Rustic Wedding Cake

I made my daughter’s wedding cake and used a lemon buttercream to ice it. I believe buttercream icing is both simple and delicious. I find it is so much tastier and the tartness of the lemon just offsets the sweetness of the icing just wonderfully without taking away from the cake itself.

The rustic wedding cake made for one of my daughters.

There was basically only 4 requirements from the bridal couple:
1/. White chocolate mud cake
2/. Raspberry coulis swirled through the cake
3/. Three tiered cake
4/. White butter cream icing in a rustic look.

My daughter seems to believe I can make anything, but cake decorating at the 'professional' level for a wedding was pushing me way out of my comfort zone. I haven't done much cake decorating over the years and certainly nothing close to a wedding cake level.
 

The bride helping me make the buttercream

We had a trial run. Each layer had homemade raspberry coulis swirled through just like any rainbow swirled cake mix.  I quickly realized that having the coulis come close to the edge when I swirled it, made the edges break away easily thus making it very difficult to cover with the buttercream, so that was my first lesson learnt. We then crumb coated the 3 layers.
 

The coulis is too close to the edges on the trial cake

We then layered the cakes on top of each other and put them on a lazy susan so we could practice the icing technique to try and achieve something close to the rustic look the bride found & liked on Bridal Musing Site.

Our inspiration

My trial cake looked nothing like the one above but when we scattered some strawberries I just happened to have in the fridge over the layers, it really made a huge difference. The bride was worried that it wasn't big enough, so we determined that the real wedding cake was going to have double layers on each tier!

The trial wedding cake

Since I am still having periodic bouts of fatigue so we experimented with freezing our trial cake after it had been iced, so that it could be done on one of my good days. I found that it defrosted without any deterioration in quality of the cake itself or the buttercream icing providing that it was wrapped in plastic cling wrap after it froze solid and kept it wrapped as it slowly defrosted overnight.


I start freaking out about how was I going to transport it over an hour away, without damaging it and how to decorate it. I decided to transport each tier separately and finish assembling at the reception venue. I didn't weigh it but I am sure it was at least 15kg collectively. It was jolly heavy that's for sure!

Thankfully my sister was willing to adorn the cake with beautiful red roses making this the gorgeously rustic yet romantic three tiered wedding cake it turned out to be.

Finishing the cake I am on the left and my sister on the right!

I will post the recipe in the next post in case anyone is interested to try it for themselves. It did take quite a bit of time both the baking and the assembling/icing. No wonder wedding cakes costs a packet but it is something many of us can do given a little time and practice! I can bake but believe me when I say I am not a cake decorator!

The bride and groom cut the cake