It's flattering to be asked to make a wedding cake but I usually decline as my baking skills can be a little hit or miss. I made an exception for our friends Ad & Iona because they are lovely and I was confident they wouldn't disown me if it all went horribly wrong and I turned up with a Battenberg.  

Surprisingly I was pretty relaxed on this one (at least that's how I remember it). There were no dramas, no meltdowns and it came together perfectly. Maybe it helped booking a week off work and planning every little detail - or maybe I just got lucky!


I tried my best to give Ad & Iona the wedding cake experience. We talked about ideas, had a cake tasting and I even managed a sketch despite the fact I can't draw. 

So the bottom tier was always going to be a vanilla sponge. The other flavours we tried were coffee, chocolate with a dark chocolate ganache and carrot cake with a cream cheese frosting. My first ever carrot cake!

My smallest tin is a 6 inch round, so I baked a fairly rustic 6 inch cake for each knowing they have plenty of friends and family to share them with. 


With the flavours picked Iona got busy pinning cakes and highlighting what she liked most about each one. I took all those favourite bits and came up with a design (complete with spelling mistakes)...
In Ad's words "exactly like the drawing" - I'm not sure if that's a compliment?!


Chuffed with my sharp edges! Ironically, I was most worried about stencilling the middle tier and this turned out to be the quickest and easiest job. On the other hand the silver leaf should have taken 5 minutes but required a lot of patience. It was McGreevy Cake's tutorial that led me in to a false sense of security. She made it look so easy but no matter what I did the leaf just didn't want to stick. I wouldn't say I mastered it in the end, I just persevered and tiny tiny bits at a time, I eventually got the effect I wanted/settled for. Good thing I was going for a vintage patchy look.

The beautiful cake topper almost didn't make it. It literally turned up as Ad was leaving on the day of the wedding. I'm so glad it did because it completes the cake, although I'm certain the reserve made by Iona's mum would have looked just as lovely.


The bottom tier took several years to complete - at least that's what it felt like it. Those petal ruffles seemed to go on forever but I love how they turned out. Originally I had baked three layers for the bottom tier so I was glad I'd only opted to use two of them by the time I got to those ruffles!

Unfortunately my second ever carrot cake wasn't quite as good as my first. For some reason it didn't rise as much as it did for the taster so I had to bake another and make the top tier 4 layers to get the height I wanted. I also replaced the cream cheese frosting with an orange flavoured buttercream. The more I thought about it, the more I didn't want to risk the cream cheese knowing it would be out of the fridge all day in June weather.

Thanks to Kara Couture Cakes for her wonderful sugar rose tutorial. My petal veiner is a bit rubbish but I was really pleased with how they turned out. The centres were beautifully delicate and spiralled but my fat fingers squashed them as I attached them to the cake. They might have been easier to handle if they were wired but I wanted to avoid poking posy picks in to the cake.


There are no progress pictures for this one because I decided to capture it all in a time lapse video - I thought Ad and Iona might like to see their cake in the making. Despite being an IT bod I had no idea how to go about this. Lucky for me the Go Pro has a time lapse setting and Movie Maker is easy peasy. So here it is, 5 days in 12 minutes!