Baking Delights » homemade wedding cakes

How to Make Wedding Cakes 6: Helps, Tips, and Hints

Marye Audet — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 15:23:02 +0000

Really, if you have been reading all along there isn’t that much to add. Making a wedding cake is not much different from making a birthday cake, only you have to deal with more layers and make sure that the construction is stable.

It is best if you work according to a written schedule. Weddings are a chaotic, hectic, stressful time and it is easy to forget to do something. Write it down! You may find the following schedule to be helpful.

Four months before the wedding:

Do your research and decide what shape, style, flavor and size of cake you want. Look at as many cakes as possible. Many hobby and craft stores carry the Wilton books and magazines that deal exclusively with wedding cakes. I like these because not only do they show excellent pictures, and have great instructions, they have a list of the tips and other items you will need to successfully finish your cake.

Order everything you need. Tips, decorating bags, pans, separator plates, icing colors, edible glitter…whatever you are going to need order it all at once. If you are using boxed mixes start buying them now as they come on sale. As a rule of thumb a box makes 6 cups of mix. I suggest using the 2-inch deep pans and not the 3-inch deep pans. Weight becomes a difficult issue to work around.

One box of cake mix will make:

2 8- inch layers

1 10-inch layer

You will need a box and a half to two boxes for any larger layers. Again, mixes vary so plan accordingly. Use this very helpful chart at Wilton.

3 months ahead

bake your cakes, wrap securely and freeze in heavy duty foil.

2 months ahead

Recheck your supplies and instructions for the cake you are making and order in anything you may have forgotten

1 week ahead

Make any melted chocolate decoration you may be making such as:

scrolls
monograms
shells

4 days ahead

Remove cakes from freezer and allow to thaw completely. Keep wrapped.

Make icing and tint in all of the colors you will need. Fill your decorating bags. Practice techniques you are new at on a piece of parchment.

Icing Specifics:

These amounts do NOT include the icing needed for actual decorating.

2 8- inch layers-4 cups of icing

2 10-inch layers- 5 cups of icing

2 12-inch layers 6 cups of icing

2 14-inch layers 10 cups of icing

Remember that one batch of icing yields about 3-4 cups

3 days ahead

Ice your cake with crumb layer

2 days ahead

finish icing and decorating your cake. Set it up to make sure everything will work. Adjust as needed. Disassemble tiers and place in containers for transport.

Put together a container for any “911″ decorating you may need to do when you reassemble the cake. Put in bags with icing, any glitter or sugar, and decorating tips, and well as an offset spatula, and an icing knife.

Day before

Transport cake carefully. Assemble cake on cake table and make any adjustments, or fixes you need to make. You may want to leave the tiers unassembled and have someone you trust to do it just before the reception. Admire your work. Great job!

Day of the wedding

Check the cake, or have someone check it to make sure everything is o.k. Assemble the tiers if you have not yet done so.

Congrats!

Review

More Cakes for Inspiration:

Wedding Fantasies:The Most Awesome Cakes in the Universe- I did this post last fall, but it has some incredible cakes pictured on it!

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How to Make Your Own Wedding Cake: Part One

Marye Audet — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:09:29 +0000

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.

Used by permission

Post from: Baking Delights