How to Make Your Own Wedding Cake: Part One
April 1, 2008 by Marye Audet
Filed under Cakes, Tips and Techniques, Tutorials and Basics
Take a deep breath. I am going to tell you a secret…
Making a wedding cake is not so very hard to do. You can save a TON of money, and end up with a better tasting cake than if you bought it. I promise.
And seriously, have I ever lied to you before?
The end product will be beautiful, especially if you keep it elegantly simple. Personally, I hate the idea of spending 600.00 on cardboard cake slices.
So here is part one of how to make your own wedding cake. How to choose the recipe and what flavor to make it.
First, you need to decide on a recipe. There are two schools of thought here. You can make the cake from a mix (hey, that bakery was probably going to!), adding flavoring to make it better….
or…
You can use a good cake recipe. If you want to make it from scratch I suggest one of the following:
Both are moist enough to handle being moved around and the insertion of dowels, and both are dense enough to support layers.
Using a box mix really isn’t a bad idea, though. They are formulated to come out the same every time…and I will admit to using a boxed mix for my daughter’s wedding cake. I was doing the catering, the cakes, and the flowers, as well as making her wedding dress AND decorating the church, and I did not need the stress of a homemade cake falling apart because I forgot the baking powder.
This is a Grooms cake my eldest daughter and I made for a close friend.
If you decide to use a box mix then consider adding the following flavorings per box:
1 tsp vanilla + 1/2 tsp almond
1 tbs rose + 1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp lemon + 1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp banana + 1 tsp vanilla + 1/2 tsp walnut
1 tbs rose + 1 tsp almond
or use your favorite tea as the water in the recipe (if you are making a white cake and use tea, your cake will not be white)
Next decide on filling flavors. Depending on how many tiers and layers you have you can do many different combinations…some of my favorites are:
- Irish Cream
- lemon curd
- orange curd
- rio star grapefruit curd
- lime curd
- raspberry
- coconut
- chai buttercream
- coffee buttercream
- chocolate ganache
- vanilla bean buttercream
- oreo buttercream
You can add to the flavor further by brushing with flavored syrups. What about an orange cake, brushed with a lavender syrup?
Or some other flavors that might be interesting are:
chai- ginger
milk chocolate- raspberry
lemon-blueberry
mango-coconut
If you can imagine the flavor you can create it in your cake very easily. When I did my daughter’s wedding we did the wedding cake in an intense vanilla with Bailey’s filling. The grooms cake was dark chocolate, with ganache filling and bittersweet frosting. Check out all the flavorings at Candyland Crafts to get an idea of what I am saying about the number of flavors available. And any flavor can be added easily to a boxed mix to change it totally and create a uniquely flavored cake, just for you.
You will need several boxes of cake mix, or recipes of batter. Wilton has an awesome chart here that tells you how many cups of mix you will need for each type and size of pan. It also gives you the servings you can expect to get from each size. One you know how many servings you will need you can figure how big to make your cake. I suggest you figure it 10% more than you need because it is better to have too much than too little.
When Erin was married I picked up boxed mix on sale for 89 cents a box. It took twelve boxes to make the cake to feed 125 people, as I recall. $10.68 cents for the cake itself.
You think about the flavor combo you want, and tomorrow we will talk about tiers, stacks and shapes.
Images: Personal Collection, Marye Audet (c)2008 Aprons Strings and Simmering Things
Used by permission
Awesome! The only problem is…will I actually be able to FIND this in a few years when my girls are old enough to consider getting married? Since Hailey’s only 16, I figure I get a couple more years at least…
Jennifer…just email me..I will help ya through step by step…LOL!
What a great resource you are!
I agree, the perfect party cake would be a good wedding cake candidate.
Thanks Carrie!
I try.
Awesome series. I love cool wedding cakes - it’s the wedding part that I don’t adore. But the cakes. Bliss. I can’t believe you made that cake. Ok, off to read more of the series.
LOL! Jennifer.
Awesome…
I was searching for wedding cakes and came across this website. I do know how to bake a easy plain cake but not a wedding cake. Reading your stories motivate me to make my own wedding cake (my wedding is next year) and saves me lotsa money too! Thank you. 
Lynn- Congrats! You can do this…
be sure to read through the whole series…
hi there, my fiance and I are getting married this august and for the most part we are keeping it very simple and low-cost. I was wondering if you had any ideas on making our own cake with raspberries? anything would help a ton.
thanks, michael
Michael:
Did you want like a raspberry filling? A raspberry buttercream? Or raspberries for the decorations?
Jennifer,
I just read part one and cant wait to read the rest, my wedding cake guy just japped out on me and now i dont have the money to do anything but make my own and creativity is on vacation in my life, I want something simple, square that involves fresh flowers any ideas?
Thanks Jessica
Hi Marye…I’m making the wedding cake for my daughter’s wedding in August. I just tried a recipe from scratch, and it didn’t rise well. I was excited to hear from your website that boxed mixes are a possibility. I had read they aren’t dense enough for a stacked cake…is that true. I appreciate your help SO much! Jennifer
Jennifer, I use boxed mixes for all my stacked cakes, You need to be sure that you support the layers well with the straws or dowels. I have never had a problem.
Thank you so much!!!!
I just wanted to say thank you for all the helpful wedding cake information you have on this blog. For my mom and dad’s 25th wedding anniversary, I decided to bake a mini wedding-type cake. I had no idea where to begin, and I stumbled across this blog. It was so VERY helpful–I used your golden cake and icing recipe–it turned out wonderfully! Thank you for sharing with us…you were an answer to prayer.
Wow..Katherine..THANK YOU!!
Hi Marye, I’m considering making my own wedding cake. what is the golden cake recipe and frosting that was mentioned by kathryn?
Louise it is a recipe on this site. Do a search for gold cake. Let me know if you can’t find it.
Hi - I am making my daughters wedding cake for her wedding in July - we made the first practice cake yesterday and covered it with fondant - I am not so sure I like the look - which do you prefer fondant of butter cream? I will be making another one next week.
Linda…I just don’t like fondant, personally. I dislike the way it tastes and it is hard to work with unless you have practiced practiced practiced.
I’m thinking of making the cake for my wedding in August. Would it work to use three different kinds of cakes? We’re thinking lemon poppy seed, some sort of spice cake - like pumpkin or apple, and chocolate.
My girlfriend (now fiance) are getting married this September. For the past year we’ve been getting really into baking. Once we found a fondant recipe we really liked (Google “Marshmallow Fondant”) we became the designated cake bakers for everyone in our family’s birthdays and holidays (if you go to the forum on my PaperBulletCothing.com web site I have a topic posting pictures of some of the cakes we’ve done).
Anyway, after I proposed to her it just came natural for us to decide to do our own wedding cake. We’ve never done a multi-tier cake before so we’ve been a bit concerned. My main concern is making sure the bottom layer is strong enough to support the upper layers. Each tier isn’t going to be directly on the tier below it. We bought tier separators that we really liked. I’m concerned because our cakes are usually really soft and fluffy. The fondant gives it a bit more support but the cake itself is still very soft.
I was wondering if it would be a good idea to create some kind of support system inside the bottom (and maybe the middle) tier(s) to hold the weight. Something small and simple. I was thinking 4 wooden skewers in a square pattern cut to fit just to the top of the bottom tier so the weight of the tiers above it will be held up by the skewers instead of the cake itself. They could be easily removed while cutting the cake and because of their size they wouldn’t leave a big hole in the cake.
Do you think this would be a good idea? My other concern with using skewers to support them is if one of them starts to slip out of place. It would cause all the upper weight to be unbalanced and the whole thing would come crashing down. Do you think the skewers would work or should the amount of surface area for the tier separators be enough to support the upper tiers without caving in the bottom tier?
Thanks!
Chris
Each tier should have about six dowels to support the separator of the tier above it. Wilton.com has some excellent information on how to do this. You will transport them in separate layers and set them up at the reception site.
I fyu read through Wedding cakes part 2-6 on this site you should find some good informaiton as well. Good luck.
Do you know of any edible flowers And what cake frosting combos that would go with them? I’m getting married in August.
Macrina- there are hundreds of types of edible flowers. Roses are a popular one..and rosewater flavoring is easy to get. You might try doing a web search for edible flowers.
Thank you, your sight has been very helpful.
It’s nice to get a response so soon!
The day of my wedding is also my sister, and my Fiance’s Birthday, so we’re also going to make a two stack birthday cake, I have seen pictures of like Alice in wonderland type cakes where they’re stacked crooked on top of each other. Do you know how to do that? Would it be way to hard?
Macrina,
I would NOT suggest trying to do one of those types of stacked cakes without a lot of experience under your belt. I have not done one but from what I have heard they are complex.
ha ha thanks, I’m not gonna try it.
ok im getting married in 1 year and i went to do my cake but i followed ur advice and they still didnt do what i wanted …so my ? for ya is what more can i do do get them to do my cake the way i want it to look?
Lily, could you rephrase your question? I am not sure what you are asking.