Cakes - Vegans and Weddings

Well, its been a mad couple of weeks in the tea rooms we have been commissioned to make some cakes some short notice (5 days) and some long standing (over 12 months). They both cam with their challenges, but both were equally enjoyable and nerve wracking.

The first one was a vegan cake and not being one to shy away from a challenge said yes after checking a couple of recipes out. As I began to look into things a little more I realised that it wasn't just the cake that had to be egg and dairy free, so I set to work checking out the rest of my ingredients including my icing sheets and the edible printing ink. Once I was happy that all my ingredients were vegan friendly I began working on the design. Celebration cakes are one of my favourite to do as they can bring out the person's personality and likes and have lots of room to play with colour etc. Once the design was right the I was happy to set to work on the batter. I always taste the batter before it's cooked and was surprised at how much it tasted like normal cake batter, this is when the panic started to set in. Is it a cake, are the ingredients really vegan, so I got EC1 to check them using vegan womble's website. Cooked it, was please to see it had risen a little bit but not enough to be a 'normal' cake panic over. I realised that no way was this cake deep enough to be a johnny concrete creation (i don't normally bake the cakes Mr Concrete does, I only decorate them), so I had to quickly prepare another batter and cook it. It turned out exactly the same. Now we had a cake that was worthy to be decorated by me. The buttercream (made with dairy free spread - must stop calling it butter cream) went together and tasted ok. The rest of the cake was pretty straight forward, If anyone has any information about the glue used by cake makers and whether it's suitable for vegans please let me know. The ribbon was pinned in place as I couldn't find any info and the topper was stuck on with water. Here's a picture

vegan

The Wedding Cake

Next was the wedding cake! The had been ordered back in February and were sitting in their boxes awaiting me to work some sort of magic on them. I have learnt from past experiences with wedding cakes not to experiment with the design or layout as on the day it doesn't happen the way you planned. This was another first for us a cake with no icing! Just buttercream! What was I going to do? How would I layer it? How could I move it and not get my finger marks in it? These were just some of the questions rolling through my mind as well as other tea room stuff. It didn't cross my mind about getting the grooves in the buttercream and a steady hand which I don't have. thank God for the advice from the DIY Icing Centre in Erdington. They are just fab and can't recommend them enough. This was quiet therapeutic to do and the leveling and smoothing was quite calming for the soul. Now, don't laugh when I tell you this but large cakes like this tend to take on a life of their own and whilst I have an image and the bride may have an image in their head the cake develops and comes to life. For the first time ever we assembled a cake then delivered it then decorated it, sorry if you were in the cars behind us driving 5mph up the Birmingham Road on Saturday, but 4 tier cakes and potholes don't go together! Needless to say the image in my head about how the cake should be decorated and how the cake was decorated didn't match. But the end results were far more beautiful than I had imagined and both Mr and Mrs Price loved it. I waited with baited breath for the text message and hearing the guests talk on the night made the stress worth it. Here's the final master piece.

buttercream wedding