Hornbill wedding

Here's another wedding cake I made for an old friend. After my very first wedding cake, I kinda promised myself not to take on anymore wedding cakes, as it is really a lot of work and extremely stressful. Since it is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, the pressure is really on you to achieve perfection!

Well, anyway, I still found myself saying yes, when my friend asked me to do her cake! :) What can I say? I think I thrive on stress... no stress makes for a boring life no? I love a challenge too anyway, and when I saw her artwork for her wedding invitation, I was hooked!

They chose to go with a really cool 'tribal chic' theme, and the daring colour combination of red and black! I love the design and knew right away that I wanted to hand craft the hornbills. I initially made a prototype, black pair which were too big and too black, and also they did not harden right. Then, after some consultation with the bride, I made another pair which were smaller and more delicate and also red in colour.

These guys are made of gumpaste and are edible, except for the toothpick at the bottom, necessary for anchoring the topper to the cake. It was meticulous work, making them. First I made stencils by tracing the pattern onto a transparency sheet. Then I cut out the pattern, removing the curls inside the wing as well. This then became my stencil. Using this stencil, I cut out two hornbills from gumpaste. I initially wanted to make an extra one just in case one broke or something, but was too lazy in the end! :)

After that, I made the curly pattern in the wings using small ropes of gumpaste. I did think of using royal icing, but was not sure I could get the same shade of red. I was also too lazy to whip up a batch just for this purpose!

Anyway, the cake is American chocolate. The top tier is a styrofoam dummy, because I did not want it to be too heavy, lest the whole structure cave in!! I think the black and  white cake tiers worked very well to set off the red hornbill topper. It was a good contrast.

The bride incorporated a lot of red roses into her wedding and she liked the idea of rose petals around the cake. It helped brighten up the predominantly monochrome cake.

I am so proud to have completed a second wedding cake, but I seriously do think they're not worth all the strife and nerves! So much work goes into the masterpiece which gets displayed for an hour or so only to get demolished! Thus, I will once again try my best to not get tempted to attempt another one!! :) Good luck to me...