[Inez] Wedding cake: practice round (part 2)

Alrighty friends, so we've gotten through Day 1 and Day 2 of making a practice wedding cake. The cakes are baked and frosted in individual tiers, and they have just sat in the fridge overnight. Not too long before the wedding (or event in which you invite all your friends to eat the enormous amount of cake you just made), you want to assemble the cake and make it pretty. I say not too long before the eating event because I don't have a box or other container large enough to hold an entire wedding cake, so it's just going to be sitting in the fridge, and you don't want your frosting to dry out or anything.

The first step in assembling your tiered cake is to remove each tier from the fridge and inspect the frosting for any damage that may have been incurred by your totally homemade cake covering mechanism. I had some extra vanilla frosting, so I just went around and added a very thin layer of frosting  which I had softened up quite a bit so it was like the consistency of mayonnaise. Because the cake had just come out of the fridge, the existing frosting was very firm, so I was able to easily smooth out any imperfections without messing with the existing frosting job.


Then you need to add some dowels. You can get plastic ones that are sort of like strong straws, but they cost a lot more. These were pretty cheap. Insert a dowel into your cake and mark it where the frosting comes up to. Then cut it just a bit above that mark. Mark and cut all dowels for the layer so they're exactly the same height.

Colin was the master of dowel-cutting. He opted to use a vice grip for accuracy.

I stuck five dowels in the bottom (12 inch) tier, and three in the middle (9 inch) tier.

You can see there is a slight gap between each layer. That gap kept me from having a heart attack when I placed each tier on top of the one beneath it.

Then, make it pretty! I played around with a few different piping tips and methods.

The bottom one is pretty, but I didn't do it very evenly. I was figuring it out as I went. I'll be practicing that between now and wedding day.

Sometimes I felt like the gap made it difficult to pipe evenly and well, especially with the middle tier. It just didn't have enough to stick to. If I use the shell design (see the lower border in the picture below), I may put a small plain rope of piped icing that I can then build off of with a pretty border.

Now, for the actual wedding cake I'll be decorating with flowers. Of course, I don't have the flowers yet. The cake looked nice, but very plain. So at Colin's suggestion, I made some pretty little decorations with one of the piping tips I have. I really like this one, because you don't have to do anything except pipe on a little blob, and it comes out looking like a flower!

Then I added some little silver sugar balls.

And in the end it looked like a real wedding cake.

A couple of notes: In the picture below, you can see that the cake turned sort of blue on the bottom slice:

The bottom layer of filling has red food coloring and did not dye the cake. The middle and top layer of filling had jam next to the cake, with filling in between the layers of jam -- and it dyed the cake. So I'll not be using jam, and will be using food coloring.

Another note: I used a vanilla bean in the plain frosting, and you can see vanilla bean specks in the frosting covering the cake. I won't be doing that for the real deal, just for a more uniform look.