Making My Own Wedding Cake, Part 1: What I Learnt, and My Reflections

28 years a single woman, and one day changed it all! I have been a married woman for three weeks and, my God, it’s still surreal.

(Part One is where I share my feelings on the experience of planning my wedding and making my cake. For the recipe for the cake itself, click here)

My wedding day to Simon went by so incredibly fast it’s like it didn’t even happen; it was like a dream! I got up at 7:30 on Saturday June 22^nd, and it went from getting my hair and makeup done, to getting my dress put on at the hotel, to getting legally married in the church I’d grown up in, having family photos, back to the hotel for a wonderful snacks and bubbly reception on a red carpet, into the function room for a delicious meal and dessert, then dancing to live music for hours on end and before I knew it it was 02:00 in the morning.

To me, it felt like Christmas dinner: you spend months preparing for, then hours making the dinner, and it takes less than an hour to eat. Simon, my parents and I spent 16 months planning the wedding, which went off without a hitch, and it was literally all over in 18 hours. It’s hard to tell a worrying bride-to-be that it’s only one day in the rest of your lives, but until you've been through the whole “forever planning, but over in a flash” thing yourself, you won’t actually believe it. And, as with all things, there are things you learn in the planning process. The issue is with weddings, you don’t really ever plan to “do it differently the next time”! I’ll just have to pass the wisdom onto my other bride-to-be friends, and to my sons and/or daughters when their time comes, decades from now.

Wedding Things I Learnt, and Would Advise

The main thing I was taught by the planning was don’t let planning take over your life! Set aside a certain amount of time in the week for planning, or even set aside days of the week that are your planning days, and then live your normal life the rest of the time. Don’t neglect your friends, your hobbies, or your time off. It’ll make you miserable, and anxious.

If planning the wedding with family, remember to do un-wedding related stuff with them too. Don't let the wedding come between you and your relationship with parents and siblings. Especially when money is involved.

Don’t skimp on a photographer or videographer. Make sure your special day is recorded well, and that you’ll get a wonderful album of photos and a lovely video to look back on as you age together. Maybe your kids will want to see them, too! I love looking at my grandmother’s wedding photos, and I know our grandchildren will love looking at ours.

Also, people will remember the bride and groom’s outfits, the food, and the entertainment; the other, smaller stuff will fade from memory. We chose a band which we knew were solid professionals who played excellent music, and the dancefloor was on fire for the whole night. We chose our hotel based pretty much completely on the food, and it was a wise choice: our guests waxed lyrical about how excellent the food and the service was.  But, most likely, the guests won’t remember what our ring box looked like, or that the roses printed on the service sheets were the wrong shade of red. 

(On the topic of the hotel: make your life easy and go with a venue that pretty much has everything included in their package. All I had to do was send them the seating plan, tell them what food we wanted, and turn up two days before with any extra decorations and the cake. They were a dream to work with, because at no point was I worrying about doing everything.)

But anyway, speaking of sweating the small stuff, that’s where the cake comes in: nobody really paid attention to the icing I spent hours agonising over, or to the coordinated paper cases, they remembered that the cake was delicious. Success!

(This was taken by a guest, Katie. I'm waiting for the professional pictures)

The Cake Design

I asked Simon what kind of cake he wanted, and he said a lemon drizzle. I explained that it’s a fairly rustic cake that would suit the naked cake trend very well. Simon, however, doesn’t like the naked cake trend: he says it looks unfinished. So, we settled for a lemon layer cake with white chocolate icing: lemon and almond cake layers, layered with lemon curd and soaked in lemon syrup, flat iced with lemon and vanilla buttercream, and finally glazed with white chocolate for a smooth finish (this ended up not happening in quite that way, but I’ll get to that later).

As I have written about in previous blogs, we opted for cupcakes to feed the guests. As such, I made 120 cakes (we only had 95 guests, but it was to have extras just in case.... and every single one was eaten), half of which were lemon vanilla, and the other half were chocolate.

(This was taken by a guest, Simon. I'm waiting for the professional pictures)

Simon painstakingly painted the toppers by hand. As a hobby, he paints Games Workshop models, which are collectable models usually in the shape of fantasy soldiers, wizards, or robots. He painted two models, one a man and one a woman. They were placed back to back on the cake.

I also had some cute little chocolate ladybirds, which I buy in Lidl whenever they’re on sale. They have them in stock normally every other Easter season.

Making the Cake

My cake was made in two stages: first, the fairy cakes were baked, iced, and frozen two weeks in advance, along with the sponge for the main cake. On the Thursday before the wedding, which was on a Saturday, I defrosted the main cake and filled and decorated it.

Decorating the cake hit a few snags, however. Bizarrely, my husband agreed to let his brother and mother stay in our house for the week before the wedding, despite my mother having cleaned her own entire house for them to stay in for the week. He was very nervous, and I’d say he wanted them around him, but having my panicking husband-to-be and two extra guests in the house was not what I needed to make the cake!

White chocolate is notoriously difficult to work with, and I unfortunately had a disaster while working with it. Because I was distracted by my guests, I accidentally poured the white chocolate ganache on the buttercreamed cake while it was still hot. This, of course, melted the whole thing. Not a worry! It’s not what I wanted, but it was fixable. I scraped the melted icing off, and re-iced it.

I had popped the cake in the freezer to chill the outer layer of buttercream to prep it for another coat of ganache (cooled, this time), and in his excitement to show his brother and mother, he accidentally knocked it over, destroying the icing and some of the little cakes. Needless to say, I lost my temper. My mother came to pick me up to finish the cake in her house instead. I opted out of the glazing idea, and just used the leftover ganache to make some white chocolate fudge icing and iced the cake with swirling designs.

Transporting the cakes

Over the Christmas period in work, I collected all the plastic tubs from chocolates and biscuits and collected a good 10 or 12 tubs. I used these to store the cakes in the freezer. Simon and I bought a chest freezer specifically for the purpose of making the wedding cake.

To move them from the house, I bought some cardboard boxes on eBay. Each box housed 24 cupcakes, so I bought 5, which --  including postage – came to about £24. They were delivered from England within 5 days, and arrived on the Tuesday before the wedding.

On the Thursday before the wedding, my brother and I packed the boxes with the frozen cakes, taped them shut, and wrote the important information on the top. He then took them to the hotel, where they arrived, defrosted, in perfect condition. The boxes also fit perfectly in the boot of my brother's car.

The following day, the main cake was also transported. I made sure to get him a gift for all the work he did, and also for his partner, who ended up being my maid of honour. I had originally asked by sister-in-law, but she gave birth 5 weeks before the wedding so she had enough on her hands!

(Saying "Goodbye!" to the cakes before they headed to the hotel)

Reflection

Firstly, I’m still a little disappointed in the result of the icing on the main cake, but nobody noticed it in the end, so I worried over nothing. Nobody really looked at the cake (only one guest took pictures of it, and we’re still waiting for the photographer to give us his pictures), and once people ate it it was all cut up and no-one could see the icing job anyway.

Secondly, the cardboard boxes were a great investment. If you ever need to move cupcakes, get some!

Lastly, the main lesson I learnt, is that even if you practise making a cake a hundred thousand times, you can still make mistakes. Big, massive mistakes. I made 120 cupcakes that went perfectly well, and then I made a big cake which I had done practise and test runs of a hundred times, but it didn’t work on the day. My Dad used a great analogy: “Olympic athletes train for years. They dedicate hours of their lives to their sport. And even once they have been chosen to represent their country, they can still make mistakes once the pressure of competing is put on them”.

I've learnt a lot about making things under pressure!

If you're gonna make your own wedding cake, make sure that when you're working on it your environment is peaceful and exactly how you need it to be to work properly. If you need to banish people from your house, do it. If you need to listen to blaring music or prefer working in silence, do it. And, for the love of God, don't worry about wasting ingredients! It'll happen, it's inevitable. But even if a cake goes horribly wrong and you have to start again, it'll still be cheaper than commissioning a cake.

And also, try to make as much of it in advance as possible.

Conclusion

All in all, I enjoyed the experience, and the wedding was wonderful! I've learnt so much about baking for events, and I think I did very well all things considered! I hope you've enjoyed reading about my experiences!