Somewhere in the back of my mind when I started decorating cakes 33 years ago was the idea that I would make my children’s wedding cake someday. My first cake was extremely basic, no decorating skills at all. A cake mix, store bought icing and hard candy decorations. I think I’m a little better now, lol. This cake was nerve racking. It was so important that nothing go wrong. I practiced my recipes for the cake and the frosting. There are six layers to this cake and five flavors of cake. Each tier has two layers. The six inch layer and the eight inch layer are red velvet cheese cake. This was a recipe from scratch using the recipe from Gretchen at Woodland Bakery in NY. I also used her recipe for Swiss butter-cream frosting. The ten inch tier was Almond/Apricot Marzipan pound cake, very heavy and such flavor! This recipe was also a scratch recipe. The 12 inch tier was Cappuccino flavored. I tried a scratch recipe and didn’t like the way it turned out. I even tried a recipe from a cake mix. I didn’t like it either. So using chocolate cake mix I doctored it myself and got what I was looking for. The 14 inch tier was really simple because I made a lemon poppy seed cake. I’ve done this cake many times, it’s a favorite of my family. It starts with a lemon cake mix to which I add poppy seeds lemon extract and lime zest (finely chopped). For the biggest tier, which was 16 inches, I used my death by chocolate recipe. This also starts with a cake mix. The most chocolate flavored cake mix you can find, a small box of chocolate pudding per box of cake mix, some mini chocolate chips and it is to die for if you are a chocaholic. This cake more then worked for the 200 people I was told to expect. One last thing to be aware of encase your doing your own wedding cake, don’t let them set up the cake by where the musicians are playing. You can’t hear the people when they say what flavor they want, and it’s just to darn loud. I had an idea when serving the cake, get florist pics for each layer. You know the plastic pic that holds the card that goes with the flowers? Put the pic in each cake with a card saying what flavor it is, then they can just point to what they want. When it came time for serving the cake we separated the tiers for easier cutting.
Days of work demolished in the space of an hour, lol.