Welcome to Wedding Weekend

Well, at least welcome to my post about Wedding Weekend! Those of you who follow me on Twitter and Facebook will have seen my posts about my hectic weekend working on two wedding cakes. The two cakes couldn't be more different and one was for some good friends of mine so the pressure was well and truly on!




I only have pictures of one of the cakes at the moment but I thought you might like to see how it all turned out. I have to admit I learnt A LOT from my cake making this weekend that I thought I would share:

• Whilst I am working in this business on my own, I will not take on more than one wedding/special occasion cake per weekend. I still work full time in the week and I think I have finally realised what my limits are! The stress of finishing the cakes and baking them all from scratch just left me worn out and I don't think its fair my home life suffer from my tiredness all the time. I will sacrifice things for Star Bakery but not my family time. Cupcakes are a different story, I could make those until they come out of my ears!
• I have already written before about my love of baking from scratch but I would consider buying cakes to carve/decorate as I currently use my little oven at home and I really had to keep on eye on the cakes in the oven to ensure they didn't over cook or drop. I also had to measure the heights of the cakes which took quite a lot of carving and batter arithmetic! I have a local bakery, Sweet Success, near me who sell cakes by the box and you just buy what you need and layer them with your own buttercream. I haven't quite decided yet but it would take the stress out of some of my cakes and I would ensure clients are fully aware of what I am doing. What are your thoughts on this?
• Fondant, fondant, fondant. I don't know why I struggle so much with covering cakes in fondant but the bigger the cake, the tougher it was! I made a 12" square cake and had to make 3 attempts to cover it without any tears/stretch marks. It drove me MAD!! I used the rolling pin method where you lift the fondant with the pin but I still find that putting the cake on a turntable makes the fondant pull downwards once I put it onto the cake (before you get a chance to trim it). Does anyone have any advice on how I can do this without tearing my fondant? I use Cornflour/Cornstarch to roll the fondant out.

I am considering paying to go onto an intensive Squires cake course as I am mostly self taught and maybe my stress would be reduced if I actually knew officially what the tricks of the trade are. I haven't had any complaints on my cakes yet but it doesn't hurt to know as much as you can!

I can also happily announce that both cakes turned out wonderfully and were a hit at the weddings. That makes it all worth it.