Gloverly Cupcakes

4 years ago two of my old house mates got engaged, they called me up to tell me the exciting news and asked if I would like to make their wedding cake. How could I refuse! I’d never made a wedding cake before so when Chloe suggested a design she liked I spent some time getting advise on how to do it, it wasn’t just a straight forward 3 tier cake. The cake mimicked the design of her beautiful dress.

The whole cake was fruit cake which was great as I could start making it weeks in advance, which I definitely needed to do for a 6 tier cake. The bottom cake was 10″ and then the next one 9″, the. 8″ etc until the 5″ one for the top. As usual for any baking on a big scale, I headed back to my parents to use my Mums big kitchen and oven and huge variety of cake tins.

Once the cakes were baked they were kept well topped up with brandy for several weeks before I started on the marzipan. I had to build up the bottom if each cake slightly with the marzipan to prevent the cake from having a tiered look, so it just got narrower gradually.

The fondant icing was the tricky part. The top of each cake was iced before I started on the edges. For each edge I rolled out a long straight piece of fondant and put it around the cake, ensuring that the 1st piece was slightly higher than the cake, then I thinned out the top edge, smoothing it and allowing it to flop outwards to make a gentle frill. I then repeated this with a shorter piece of fondant so that each cake had 2 frills around it.

Unfortunately a week before the wedding I had a bad cycling accident and wasn’t really in a fit state to take the cake to the venue and assemble it. Luckily my Mum, my husband Rich and good friends Hugh and Sylvie came to the rescue! They carefully drove the cake to the venue and had the tricky task of putting it all together. It should have been very simple, just placing each tier on top of the next one, but some of the tiers were a bit too wide at the bottom and didn’t quite slot into place, so they had to be trimmed! Finally once it was assembled it was decorated with real flowers and different sized large fake pearls. I was just about well enough to make it to the wedding the following day to see Chloe and Rory getting married and although I didn’t stay for long, I heard that the cake went down well!