Gloverly Cupcakes

At the end of the summer last year, our friends Martin and Jen got engaged. A couple of weeks later I asked if they’d like me to make the wedding cake. Jen said yes and then asked if I would like to be a bridesmaid – I said yes! So three weeks ago I made my first wedding cake.

Martin and Jen decided that they wanted the cake to be the dessert since they wanted people to actually eat it. This meant I had to make a sponge cake, which had to be made at the last minute so it was fresh. I looked at several vanilla sponge recipes and in the end I chose one from the BBC Good Food website since it gave the quantities and cooking times for 10″ and 12″ cakes. To make one 10″ and two 12″ cakes to feed all the guests, I had to buy 40 eggs! However, it was worth it – the recipe worked really well.

I took Thursday and Friday off work to make the cake and my mum came up to help wash up the bowls and tins and weigh out ingredients – what seemed like a daunting task turned out to be completely stress-free. I would definitely employ her as a kitchen helper again!

The weekend before the wedding I made all the roses. I started making lots of smallish roses out of sugar florist paste but decided I wasn’t happy with them. They weren’t realistic enough and I didn’t think they’d look right on the cake, which I wanted to keep simple. So I went and bought a bunch of white roses and copied one of them. The photo above shows the rose I made on the left and the one I copied on the right. The result was exactly what I wanted – a big, realistic rose. The cakes were not going to be stacked on top of each other so I had to make an arrangement to go on top of each cake. Just roses weren’t going to be enough – it needed more colour – so I made some simple leaves to finish it off.
I built up the roses on each tier: just one big rose on the top tier…

On the middle tier I used one big rose and two half formed roses/buds…

And finally on the bottom tier I used three full size roses and two buds…

Being a bridesmaid meant I had to take the cake to the venue on the Saturday morning while we were getting ready – so I had to drop it off and assemble it with rollers in my hair!

It was a perfect day – congratulations Martin and Jen!