 |
| Our glorious four-tier flower cascade wedding cake |
In September 2015, my fiancé Frank and I were married. Our spectacular wedding cake was a real labour of love, constructed by various family members, so I thought I'd document the process here. Additionally, we were quite proud of it, and someone may want to steal the idea for their own cake! (If you do, please tell me in the comments - I'd love to see a picture.)
Recipes
The lower three cake tiers were a traditional fruit cake based on Delia's recipe, made by my mother in March and fed with quite a lot of alcohol through to the day itself. The top tier was a
gluten-free gingered fruit cake, for people with complicated dietary requirements. Both were delicious! I made the gluten-free one again for Frank, later on, as we liked it so much.
Division of labour
| Cake baking | Christine White (Mother of the bride) |
| Cake icing | Margaret White (Grandmother of the bride) |
| Sugar Decorations | Margaret White (Grandmother of the bride) |
| Cake and flower support structure and construction blank | Peter White (Grandfather of the bride!) |
| Flower Cascade makers | Paul White (father of the bride), Peter White (Grandfather of the bride) and Catherine White (bride) |
 |
| Margaret and Paul inspecting their handiwork |
 |
| A bee for the beekeeper (my father) |
 |
| Peter putting the last touches on the flower cascade |
Inspiration
When deciding on the cake I would like, google is almost over-helpful, providing me with a bewildering array of wedding cake possibilities.
 |
| Wedding cake overload |
 |
The wedding cake vase
with prototype sugar-craft lily-of-the-valley
made by Margaret,
with botanical advice from my Aunt Sarah |
My mother had had a small vase of lily of the valley flowers on the top of her wedding cake, so we decided that if Frank and I had it on top of ours as well, it would be a nice tradition to start. This led on to the idea of a tiered cake with flower decorations.
I particularly liked this dramatic one, featuring plain white iced cakes with an elaborate flower cascade:
 |
http://kakestudio.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/spring-floral-cascade.html |
The next time I saw my grandmother, we spent a long time looking at cake videos and tutorials on how to make particular flowers from sugarpaste, the accessibility of which were a revelation to her, but I have a feeling that she already knew most if not all of the techniques demonstrated!
 |
| Some of the first flowers for the cake |
 |
| Silver or White? |
I popped in one day on my way to or from some sort of concert with Louisa Denby in Hampshire - either
Vox Cantab or Rosemary Consort - and we considered how we might make the spiral around the cake. Grandma had already made boxes and boxes of different flowers, so we took ALL the cake tins, cake boards and cake pillars out of the cupboard and tried different layouts.
 |
| Cake boards, tins, pillars and the vase! |
I decided that I preferred white pillars, so that the focus could be on the flowers, so we settled on white pillars, with slightly taller white ones up to the smallest cake, as the vase was quite tall and slim. I think in the end we have there 12", 10", 8" and 6" cake tins.
We then resorted to the highly technical method for simulating a spiralling cascade of flowers, which we achieved by squishing sponges between cake tin and cake board, and sticking the wired flowers into the bright yellow rectangles. It wasn't very pretty, but we could start to imagine the form of the final wedding cake.
 |
| Cascading flowers (almost!) |
The next challenge would be how to achieve this look in a safe, secure and portable way, bearing in mind that the real cakes and flowers would need to be transported in the boot of a car from Reading to Cambridge the day before the wedding...
... and without the sponges!
 |
Orchid, stephanotis, roses, violets, carnations,
pink things (not sure I ever knew what those were) |
Grandma gave me all the flowers and leaves she had already made and I drove them back to Cambridge to show to Frank. We decided that we needed something a little more rigid than sponge to achieve the spiral, so we mounted some pipe insulation on the back of a chair with wire and proceeded to insert flowers. It was obvious to us very quickly that, even under our inexpert hands, the flowers looked stunning, especially against a fairly dense backdrop of variegated foliage.
 |
| Made quite a nice wall decoration for a while! |
The overall effect was lovely, and we wondered about
- pre-wrapping the insulation in green florist tape, so it shouldn't be seen among the leaves
- using a wire down the centre to help swirl the insulation around, and to provide a core to mount the flowers onto the cakes.
Change of direction
 |
| Inspiration for simpler colours |
Of course, I then found this cake in one of Grandma's cake books, and decided that perhaps keeping the colours white and cream would work even better. At which point, I had to do a little bit of grovelling to my grandmother, after she had put in so much time making colourful flowers, bees and butterflies for the wedding cake, and particularly having to admit that she had suggested keeping the flowers white in the first place... oops!
 |
Green and white looking
good on our windowsill |
Baking time!
 |
| Leo didn't want to help |
We combined a cake-baking weekend with some hat-hunting for the mother of the bride fairly successfully. The hat-hunting consisted of visiting a very knowledgeable lady, who often hires out hats for the races, and whose entire house seems dedicated to millinery(?). Luckily, there was plenty of choice and we soon found a very smart item which would do nicely!
 |  |
| A little hat shopping... |
A lot of hats! |
After a significant amount of measuring, beating and mixing by my mother, and some stirring-in of good wishes by me and my father (and Frank via video link!), we had some cake mixes. There wasn't quite enough oven space to bake all four tiers and the spares (for checking edibility) at once, so the remainder were made the next week. Then the cakes were transferred to tins for safekeeping until nearer the day.
Cake Accessories
 |  |
| Typical silver cake boards | Cup hooks |
 |
 |
| Satin ribbon | Bosmere garden twine
- a perfect sugar flower stem! |
 |
| Plain white cakes |
Grandma used quite sturdy cake boards, re-covered with silver foil, and edged with white ribbon, which (like the pillars) would detract less from the flowers. A brighter white ribbon was used around the base of each cake. Each cake board was to have a cup hook screwed in to it on which the trailing flowers could be mounted. She iced out the boards on top, again to keep the cake looking beautifully simple, and added small trios of dots on the cake to improve the finished look.
In the end we used garden tie, recommended for holding up your tomatoes, and described as "foam-coated flexible wire", as the basis for the flower arrangement. To widen the amount we had to work with, we used a three-stranded plait for most of the display, and then planned to have a two-strand section at the top of the cake.
 |
| Plaiting the foam ties |
 |  |
| Calculating spiral dimensions | |
We worked out that we would probably only need to cover the "front" side of the cakes with a flower display in order to drape the flowers nicely, and that the top tier didn't really need the flowers to climb that high, as the vase would be sat on the top.
Sugar flowers
 |
| Carnations: didn't make the cut |
Construction
 |
| The cake, blending in nicely with the real flowers |
 |
| Cutting the cake! My father's sword is SHARP! |
Thank you to all family members who made the day (and the cake) so special. I hope you enjoyed watching the cake's journey from idea through to sword-slicing!
Blackpool Cakes
Dream Cakes Glasgow
Celebration cakes by carol
