Well, the wedding day has come and gone and I'm way late in posting about it. But I survived and everything turned out great - even if I did only get 2 hours of sleep the night before the wedding - lol!! :-)
Since I waited so long to do this post, I really don't even remember what order I did everything in or what days I started doing what part of the project, but the important thing is that it all got done!!
I did finally decide a week or so before the wedding that I should string fondant pearls on dental floss in order to make assembly of the cake at the site really fast (just wrap the ribbon and pearls around the base of each layer - and done). Luckily, I had my wonderful husband to help with the pearl project, because it was pretty time consuming. But I just love how they turned out - so well worth the effort.
Some of our pearls...
A close up - the ones in front have some pearl dust on them - so this is what all of them looked like in the end...
I believe it was Thursday - 2 days before the wedding, all the cakes were baked, filled then iced with buttercream, and covered with fondant. Here is my rolled out fondant for the 12 inch tier - I literally could not make a larger cake in my kitchen since this fondant was rolled out as large as I could get it on my counter...
I was so relieved when I got the largest tier covered without tearing the fondant!!
trimmed...
One of the smaller tiers...
All finished with the fondant - cakes back in the fridge for the night...
On Friday (day before wedding), I spent most of the day dipping cake balls that I had made earlier in the week. Dipping them seems to take longer than almost anything you do with cake balls (and I had a little over 250 of them). Thankfully, I got them all dipped before the rehearsal (which in case you didn't know I had to be at the rehearsal because I was also in the wedding along with the rest of my family since it was my brother's wedding). I was so crammed for time, though, that there were no pictures taken at all of the whole cake ball process. Sorry!! But in case you are wondering - we had 3 flavors of cake balls. I used 2 cakes for each flavor - so I made a total of 6 cakes for this...
(1) Chocolate Cake Balls (Chocolate Cake with Buttercream Icing)
(2) Strawberry Cake Balls (Strawberry Cake with Buttercream Icing)
(3) Peanut Butter Cake Balls (Butter Cake with Peanut Butter)
After we got home from rehearsal, I decorated the cake balls - which pretty much just means I put the stipes on and put them in their pretty candy cups for serving. Then it hit me just how much more I still needed to do to get the cake ready for quick assembly the next morning. So the work began - and ended around 2am. Again - SO thankful for my wonderful husband and all he did to help the process go quicker!! In the middle of the night - I do not normally function well - but I guess the excitement of it all just kept me going!!
I finished the largest tier completely - with ribbon and pearls attached. We also put the dowel rods in each tier and I cut the ribbon to the correct length for each tier. Here is the completed bottom tier...
Then I went ahead and stacked the cake so I could decide what I wanted to be the front and mark it (this also was to help me spend less time Saturday messing around since I had to be ready for pictures by 9am with the cake finished!!). I also went ahead and put all the flowers in the top tier. Finally - the cake was ready (well as ready as I was getting it until the wedding)...
So finally, after cleaning up and packing up everything I might possibly need for assembly the next morning, we headed to bed for a lovely 2 hours of sleep!!
We got to the church around 8:15 am Saturday morning and right around 9am - I was finished. I can't believe how quickly I got it all together even with having to get my mom to steam my sheer fabric (covering my cake stand) because it got all wrinkled in my bag. This seemed to take FOREVER because she couldn't remember how to work the steamer at first - but somehow it all worked out anyway.
Done...
Closeup of the flowers on top - these are actually made out of paper. The bride made them for me to match the bouquets used in the wedding...
Closeup of the serving knives and a better view of the cake balls...
The whole display - completely finished!!!
I truly could not have imagined this cake to be any better than it actually turned out. I had so many ideas in my head, but to see it all come together better than I imagined was just wonderful!! Plus it made me SO happy that my brother and his new wife loved it too!! Since I have never made a wedding cake (or any cake this large) before, I was so nervous that they would be disappointed in the end.
Next big project?? My baby boy's 1st Birthday cake at the end of January!!
