My labor of love for my little sister
The things you figure out for love and weddings (and to avoid the risk of being found out a fraud!)
9 months before this cake, I only ever baked box cakes as a vehicle to hold the sugar flowers I was obsessed with perfecting at the time (What the heck happened to that hobby?). Apparently my sister, Sarah, noticed my hacks on Instagram because when she got engaged, for some reason she asked me to bake her cake. The picture below, was a cake made from scratch, granted, but that was store bought frosting and some fikken flowers I had on the table. I’m 99% sure this is the pic that made her ask me to make her cake. What was she thinking??? I’m mortified to post this, but necessary to see how far I’ve come…
Now, I am not being self deprecating, while secretly wanting praise. Sometimes my baking was OK, but my decorating was not good. I have placed some evidence below. Bless you, dear sister, for having faith in my abilities. Little did you know how many of my pictures were a result of good cropping and angles. See exhibits below of some of the less pretty cakes of the journey: badly applied fondant, sunken cakes hidden by flowers, and buttercream nightmares.
The reason I am sharing this is that I want people to know baking and icing is something you have to learn how to do and spend time practicing if you want to be good at it. No-one is born with a talent for baking. At best you are a little O.C.D. and good at measuring things exactly that will give you a bit of a head start because yes, as people love to say, cooking requires much less precision than baking. Getting measurements slightly out when making a soup will not affect the soup the way it would with a cake. You have to measure things correctly (by weight if possible) and pay attention to things like the temperature of ingredients and consistency of the batter before moving on to the next step. I almost think getting into baking without having much kitchen knowledge is better than coming in sideways, all arrogant about your cooking skillz; you will follow detail and read recipes and not try to hack everything like I did. And hence, hopefully skip some of the mistakes I had to learn the hard way!
A few examples below:
You need a LOT of fondant to cover a cake. Its wasteful of the damn fondant but if you want it to look pretty you need to do it. The inside of this lemon drizzle cake was delicious though.
Two lessons here: When a recipe needs butter you can’t use oil instead - the result is a sunken cake that tastes of canola. Also if you want to cover a cake with fondant, you still have to make buttercream and ice it first so the crumb of the cake doesn’t show through. Its called: a crumb coat. And yes, it’s in every recipe but I had to learn the hard way. I will say, I did like how the marbling came out and I like the flower. That whole cake was made to hold the flower.
Applying crumb coat to a cake. Fresh cake is soft and delicate. Cold butter icing, when you didn’t bother to follow a recipe, is dense and sticky. When you try to spread something dense and sticky on something soft and tender - it rips half of your cake off and ruins everything. Make sure your cakes are fridge cold before you ice them and use this recipe for light spreadable buttercream. Don’t be like me and and ruin 5+ cakes before you realize this!
Pay attention to mixing instructions. I tried to make biscuits - the instructions say: mix until just combined. If you don’t listen and use electric beaters, you get dense, rock-like biscuits (or scones, if you are reading this from South Africa.)
The last one is difficult to see (obvious I was trying to make it look good for IG!). The buttercream curdled and had a terrible consistency. Pay attention to the temperature the butter needs to be when making buttercream - it makes a difference :)
She told me she wanted a naked cake, chocolate, covered in flowers, to feed 70 people. What I showed you above, was just getting the basics of baking right. A wedding cake is another ballgame because now you have additional variables to consider. Where will I make this cake? In what state of assembly do you transport it? How far in advance to make it so it stays fresh, but you also have time to be maid of honor on the day? What cake recipe to use that will be sturdy enough to hold its own weight but still be delicious? How to make the damn thing look beautiful and still taste delicious? What struts, and supports and discs do you need so the thing doesn’t cave in on itself under a hot metal roof on the day of the wedding? Who will carry the 10 ton cake into the venue without dropping it? I won’t bore you with the answers to those questions (let me know in the comments if you would like more detail!). Like I said, the goal of this post is to remind us all that getting better at something takes practice and motivation. And success does start to come! And if you have the love for your favorite (and only) little sister spurring you on to make something great! It all comes together in the end.
Things started to look better:
And as I practiced each element of the cake (the other recipes will be up soon, I promise!), I prayed for my sister’s happiness and for the future of this new relationship with Josh (What a guy!). Sturdiness and groundless in the chocolate cake, a little bit of dreaming and head-in-the clouds whipped into the buttercream, passion and love into the chocolate ganache, and a dash of fruitiness and crazy into the black cherries in the center. A little corny, I know, but I did and it was all there. My love language is service and every moment toiling on this project was done in love for my wonderful sister. I love you!
I had trekked a cooler box of baked cakes, (frozen) and the prepped icing and ganache already in piping bags to The Red Barn in Dulstroom. We had already decided to stay for the weekend and I was petrified by the pictures of the kitchen facilities (It is a corrugated iron shed). So I wanted to do as little as possible there. Also, being Maid of Honor, it would have really sucked to not be around to join in the fun and to be there for her. Man, had I built this thing up. In my head, it was everything. I was barely even thinking of the wedding event itself. Phew. I needed to check myself!
Sooo, I put the cake together the day before. Then the big day dawned and we were up early. I did the flowers on the day, in between sipping champagne with the other girls and getting our makeup done and having a blast! The cake turned out lovely and I was proud of it. And it ended up, as it should have, in the barn and part of the festivities in it’s proper place and at its proper significance: Dessert (but a really pretty one!). I’m so glad I put in all that effort. But, I’m also glad I realized that in the end it didn’t matter that much really, although the love and prayers baked in certainly do. And although I didn’t want to let them down and wanted to do an awesome job, I didn’t want the only thing I remembered about the wedding to be the damn cake! And it wasn’t. What a night!
Doesn’t her goodness shine out from within?
Some detail in the topper Dyl made, South African Proteas and gold leaf
