White Wedding Cake with Royal Blue Ribbon

This week I had the wonderful privilege of making my life long friend's wedding cake <3

She was having a 4th of July, beach wedding. She had picked a very simple color palette, of just navy and white, and explained the the overall theme/style as "simple" as well. So I didn't want a lot of embellishments, details, etc on the cake (which I found surprisingly hard to  edit myself for this one, I wanted to add shimmer/glitter, flowers...then more flowers, edible diamonds, etc)

I went with this very basic/rustic white butter cream cake, with two layers of a strawberry orange cake and one layer of chocolate (6in, 8in, 10in). I added a simple fondant ribbon along the bottom - in the same color as the ribbon on her wedding dress. And finished it with a little butter cream pearl border.  

Once it was all set up and ready to go I added the finishing touch - a custom made wedding topper to celebrate the new couple <3

We were very happy that it did not melt and made it to the beach in one piece (with the 3hr drive and 80deg temperatures). I feel so honored to have be part of such a special day! <3

Lattice and Lace

This week was our biggest, hardest cake to date but the time and effort payed off because it is also my favorite cake I have ever made!

I started out making two boxed cake mixes (yea, cheating. But since my class is more about decorating I let myself cut this little corner) and that produced 2-9in cakes and a dozen mini-cupcakes. I didn't need the cupcakes, so I frosted them with a light green buttercream and topped them off with a few extra flowers I had made (

I filled my cakes with my favorite ganache (2:1, choc:cream) and stacked them.

Using some thinned down buttercream frosting I created a crumb coat and allowed it to dry.

After it had set up (just at room temperature) I put on my frosting and smoothed it out with my large offset spatula.
 

Thanks to a handy little garland marking tool, I was able to seperate my cake into 8 even areas. I applied a lattice pattern on the sides of the cake, using the marks from the garland tool as a guide for starting and stopping my lines.

I applied the Corneille Lace pattern to the scallops on the top of the cake. (I had never used this technique before but after working on it for a while, it's one of my favorite patterns for a cake. Simple but elegant, and can be made in an size to give it a very different feel)

To help give the illusions of scallops, I made a very small star border around my lattice work (cleaning up all those messy edges I didn't bother cleaning up).

Wanting the top to look a little more elegant, I used a simple, small pearl border around the Corneille Lace.

Final touches to my cake included a larger, yellow shell border around the bottom of the cake (helping to cover up my very messy frosting job) and a few simple (pre-made) wild roses and drop flowers. I chose to make them in purple, because it really popped with the yellow and white frosting.

This is by far my favorite cake I've made. It's simple, elegant, and fun. It would work wonderfully as inspiration for a larger wedding cake, or even a nice birthday party, or a summer picnic.