Alana
This post is coming a little bit (read “a lot”) later than I would have liked thanks to the busy holiday season. Somehow all of the parties and dinners that I baked for took up a lot of time! Who knew!? Anyways as I mentioned in my Wedding Cake Part III and dehydrated oranges posts, Theresa and I did a practice run of the whole wedding cake a week before the wedding. The main purpose being to figure out how exactly we wanted to decorate the final wedding cake and clear our decisions with the happy couple.
Because the whole point of this cake was to decorate it, Theresa and I wanted the baking process to be as simple as possible aka we used box cake. We picked a golden cake because we thought that the sides would match the colour of the pound cake the best. The break down for the amounts of batter needed for each cake pan was as follows:
- 6 inch – 2 cups
- 8 inch – 3 ½ cups
- 10 inch – 6 cups
Just like the wedding cake, we baked two cakes in each size of pan and cut them in half to make each tier four layers. That’s a total of 23 cups of batter for the whole cake! Theresa baked the first box cake and measured the batter volume as 4 cups per box, so that’s 6 boxes of cake mix. Despite the baking process being simple, it still took quite a long time!
Once all of the cakes were out of the oven and cool, we lined them up to see which was the shortest. We cut all the cakes to that height, then in half to make all the layers. We used a cinnamon orange buttercream frosting (recipe below) between all the layers because buttercream frostings are quite quick to make. Once the tiers were assembled and stacked we noticed a huge difference in stability between this cake and the pound cake. The pound cake was solid every time we stacked it, but this cake had a lot of lean when we were working with it. We didn’t have any dowels, so we just shoved a few bamboo skewers into the top and crossed our fingers!
Questionable doweling practices.
Our decorations were themed in a similar fashion to the first cake we decorated. We knew that Ash would be using hydrangeas and rosemary in her centre pieces and as decoration, so we wanted to incorporate those into our design. We also used the dehydrated oranges that I made beforehand.
We couldn’t actually find hydrangeas when we were at the flower store, so we got mums instead.
After we were done, we made some decisions for the day of the wedding:
- We need to dust the cake before adding any of the embellishments (they catch the sugar and leave little shadows), as well as after
- We would be using white hydrangeas as our floral decorations; one big one on top, 2 other larger sprigs off set from the centre of the cake, and smaller sprigs to fill in space gaps
- We would use rosemary around the bases of each tier of cake.
- We would have a cascade of oranges traveling down the side of the cake, with a few extras to pop out behind a few of the flowers
As per custom, we headed straight to the Tea Girl with our cake. We rolled in with the cake, as well as a giant package of toilet paper and a box of chocolate (our customary Christmas gift the the owner and staff). We turned a head or two to say the least!
Photo credit to Deanna at the Tea Girl!
Cinnamon Orange Buttercream Frosting
Ingredients
- 2 cups butter, room temperature
- 4 cups confectioner sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla
- ¼ tsp orange oil (we used LorAnn Natural Orange Oil)
- ½ tsp cinnamon
Directions
- In the bowl of a stand mixer, whip the butter until light and fluffy.
- Add confectioner sugar cup by cup, mixing until incorporated in between.
- Add the vanilla, orange oil, and cinnamon. Mix until evenly distributed, pausing to scrape down the sides of the bowl once or twice.
- Frost whatever you want to frost, and enjoy 🙂
Chateau Gateau 