Andy & Athena

A sweet cousin of mine got married last year and I was honoured to have been asked to create the wedding cake and do a dessert table for the reception. I so love an elegant dessert table!

So the for the wedding cake, she wanted something with a lot of bling. So I came up with a 5 tiered cake embellished with hundreds  of silver dragees. The fondant covering was given a shimmery pearl wash. The Precious Moments topper was a ceramic one bought by my cousin herself.

 
As for the dessert table, I tried to go with the red and white colour theme. We had marshmallow pops, Oreo pops, red velvet and Belgian chocolate cupcakes, orange chocolate cake pops as well as banana cheese cake pops and pinwheel mints.

A scattering of rose petals completed the romantic set up.

As you can see, I had plenty of assistants to help me throughout the night :)

Alastair & Esther

So the first cake for 2012 was a wedding cake for Alastair and Esther. It was a two-tiered cake, with extra deep tiers. The cake was a moist red velvet cake with a light cream cheese frosting.

The bride had a red rose featured on her dress, according to the groom, so I was to replicate that on the cake. They also gave me a porcelain topper to place on top of the cake.

So since the theme was red and white, I covered the cake in white soft fondant and framed the bases in red satin ribbon. A huge, red gumpaste rose was secured to the side. I also added small pink blossoms, trailing around the cakes. I did not want the blossoms to be red, so that the rose would stand out.

The cute Betty Boop-like topper completed the whole ensemble.

I had to go to the restaurant to do the set up. Luckily Annie came with me to help carry some of my things. Thanks dear :)

Professional photographs

I just had to post these photos! It's amazing how a professional photographer can make your creations look so good!!!

These were taken by Edwin Lay Photography during Jerome and Belle's wedding in my last post. I sure wish I could take photos like these...

The quality isn't so great cause I saved these off Facebook.

The frantic last-minute piping! I seldom get shots of me at work, since I can't photograph myself... So this is nice, even though it just show's my hand! lol

See? This is what I mean; why didn't I think of shooting from this cool angle??

Orange chocolate cake balls coated in Belgium chocolate. Orange and chocolate are one of my favourite flavour combinations!!

Vanilla almond sugar cookies iced with fondant and embossed with "A & J", using a stamp I had made.

Sweet... can't wait till the next dessert table...

Jerome & Belle

A couple of our good friends tied the knot last December. I had the honour of making their wedding cake as well as preparing a dessert table! This was my first try at a full dessert table and I was mega excited! I love ogling at the dessert tables on My Sweet & Saucy and Amy Atlas' blogs. Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous....

Well anyway, Belle loves butterflies, and the theme was red and gold. So we came up with a three deep-tiered cake design, incorporating red roses, red ribbons and gold butterflies.

I started making the roses and butterflies a few weeks ahead of the event. The workshop with Alan Dunn helped a lot when it came to making the roses. I tried making them as huge as possible. It was a lot of tedious work, but the resulting roses were beautiful.

I cut the butterflies using my Patchwork cutters. I then let them dry on folded paper and dry brushed them with gold luster  powder.

The top two tiers are polystyrene dummies. I find since I am a one man show, I do not have enough time to use real cakes for huge orders. We want the cakes to be as fresh as possible, yet we need plenty of time to perfect the decoration. So I think that using dummies is a good compromise. I would of course love a wholly edible cake, but until I have a whole team of bakers working for me (and not to mention proper, big ovens) this will have to do! Hahaha...

Anyway, the bottom tier was a lovely, moist orange cake with chocolate ganache frosting. The bride didn't want too much cake anyway, since there was already going to be a dessert table.

So that was the cake.

Here's the dessert table. We arrived a little late, and I was frantically working to finish the setting up before guests arrived. I did not know how to transport so many cupcakes, so I iced them there on site! Luckily Hubby was there to give me a hand! We were still doing the final touches when guests started arriving! That's why I didn't get any decent photos!

I made chocolate and red velvet cupcakes, orange chocolate cake pops and vanilla almond sugar cookies. The cookies were heart shaped and embossed with the letters J & A. I also placed some peppermints in a nice glass stand and red roses in a glass vase.

The display cake on top of the cupcake stand was designed to tie in with the wedding cake decor. This too was made from a polystyrene dummy.

I do love dessert tables and can't wait for the next opportunity to do another one!

Alexis & Lana's wedding

Hubby's close friend Alexis, who is also my childhood friend (neighbour) got married last month and I had the honour of making their wedding cake! Since the wedding was out of town and we had to fly in, I suggested that they have a cupcake tower instead of the traditional tiered wedding cake which would be near impossible to transport!!

So I ended up making a 6" cutting cake to go on top of the cupcake tower and 27 large cupcakes (the exact number that I could squeeze into a 12" square box!) as well as 80 mini cupcakes.

The cake was a chocolate cake covered in chocolate ganache and decorated in fondant. The penguin toppers were made from gumpaste and credit for the design goes to Esther (also known as Fliepsiebiep in Flickr). Visit her Flickr page and see her amazingly adorable creations!

The cupcakes were also chocolate cake frosted with a mound of chocolate ganache each! Then I covered them in white textured fondant (I used my floral texture mat) and topped them off with red ribbon roses and black leaves. I also hot glued black ribbon and tiny black bows onto the cupcakes cases. That was too much work for such little effect that next time I think I'll be skipping that part! :)

As for the mini cupcakes, those were red velvet cake with a swirl of cream cheese frosting. This is the first time I have made and eaten red velvet cakes and they blew my mind!! They're my favouritest cake right now!

So from making, to transporting, to assembling this cupcake tower, there was a lot of work involved. But it was all worth it when the bride and groom showed their pleasure at the end product!

Weddings are kinda scary, but now that I am more experienced, I have more courage to take on extra challenges! In December, another one of our friends are getting married and I have agreed to do a wedding cake and a dessert table!! I've been ogling at dessert tables ala Amy Atlas or My Sweet and Saucy, for ages and now I really want to try one myself!! This is gonna be interesting....

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...

Forever Friends

I was surfing the net for cake ideas as usual, when I came across a Debbie Brown wedding design. It was a pair of Forever Friends bears, sitting on a sofa, holding a bunch of roses. It was just soooo adorable, I had to have a go at it.

The sofa is carved out of orange flavoured madeira cake and covered in fondant. I made the sofa a little too big though, so it's not a snuggly and comfy looking as the one in the original design.


The super cute bears are made from gumpaste. I love Forever Friends bears, they're so plush and cuddly. I only wish I had pink petal dust to give them rosy cheeks. This is the first time I've tried ribbon roses and they turned out to be very easy yet pretty!

I stuck on some heart sprinkles to make them look like scattered rose petals. I think it increased the romance level a notch. Hubby reckons it also helps fill up the empty space of the too big sofa.

We gave this creation to a couple of friends who tied the knot over the weekend. I hope they liked it! :)

My First Wedding Cake!!

Phew! I'm so proud to have completed my very first wedding cake last Saturday!

I must thank my friend Michelle for having such confidence in me that she let me make her wedding cake! I mean it's not like a birthday cake, which one has annually... it's a once-in-a-lifetime wedding cake!!

Fortunately this was her second wedding dinner, which was held at our hometown. The main dinner was the more lavish affair and was held in KL. So that took a bit of pressure off me; at least she already had a nice professionally-made cake in the first event, so if mine didn't turn out too good, it wouldn't matter as much! Well, that was my reasoning anyway...

When Hubby and I came back from our diving holiday to Sipadan, I had only one week left to complete the huge (on my scale; mammoth!) project.

Over the week, I baked many cakes and made plenty of chocolate buttercream. The cake baking was the most time consuming, because I only have one wee oven, and had to bake them one at a time. The 12" cake tray almost couldn't fit into my oven!


So anyway, the bottom tier was two 12" round American chocolate cakes. The second tier was a 10" round American chocolate cake. The third, extra-wide tier, was three 8" round orange madeira cakes. The final top tier was made of styrofoam because I did not want my nightmares of the wedding cake crashing down to come true! I seriously doubted my engineering skills, so even though I always prefer my whole creation to be edible, I had to compromise this time. There was too much at stake!

The two separators were also made from styrofoam and covered in yellow gumpaste. I cut all the styrofoam used by hand, with the aid of a craft knife. It was a lot of hard, messy work, and if I ever do this professionally, I am definitely getting a styrofoam cutter machine thingy!!

So over the week, I cut the styrofoam parts and covered them in gumpaste first, then baked the cakes whenever I had some free time and lastly covered the cakes in fondant. I was doing the fondant decorating right up to a couple of hours before the wedding dinner. Then Hubby and I went early to set up the tiers and to put the finishing touches, i.e.: the real orchids.


I did try making a gumpaste orchid, but it was so much work and too time-consuming that I decided to use real ones. I figured mother nature was a better artist and since we have orchids in abundance here, it would actually be a shame to use fake ones!

During the dinner that night, I was still struggling to push thoughts of wedding cake avalanches out of my mind. Boy was I so totally relieved when the couple finally cut the cake without any untoward incidents!! The cake was then safely disassembled and served to guests.

I must also say here that I couldn't have done it without Hubby's help! He came back one night after a World Cup session to find me frantically fussing over the extra-wide tier! I had covered it in fondant and it cracked and tore at the edges! I was in despair! I did not have the energy nor the extra fondant to redo it and neither could I leave it as it was! Thank goodness Hubby came up with a solution which saved the cake and did not use up too much more fondant!

He also helped me lug the pieces to the car and to the banquet hall. They were quite big and surprisingly heavy! Also not forgetting the words of encouragement which helped prevent me from going insane! :)

*muaks* Thanks Darling!

This design was inspired by one done by The Pink Cake Box. I love the colours and the extra-wide tiers and the floating tiers effect caused by the styrofoam separators. I went through so many designs and in the end, even though this one was tougher to make due to the wide tier, I knew it was extra special. I checked with Michelle and sure enough, she loved it too.

So here it is, my very first (and also very likely my last!) wedding cake!!

In the end I don't think a lot of people even noticed the cake, because it was sitting on the side of the stage in the dim romantic lighting.

But I don't mind. I loved it and the bride loved it, so, "Mission accomplished!!"