Presenting…

A wedding cake. :) This was the third and final project of this unit with Chef Nicholas Lodge. By the way, have I mentioned he’s FAMOUS?! No, I’m serious. Chef Nicholas made his first gum paste flower when he was 10. Now he makes over 400 varieties of flowers. He has competed for several years. Now he judges those competitions. He is originally from England. He has made cakes for royalty. I know. I was freaking out when I realized we would be so lucky to learn from him. I can say I know Nicholas Lodge. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Anyway, we made this cake the Chef Nicholas designed for us to learn how to make.

I figured each cake needed it’s own post…too many pictures to share, you know ;)

We started off making some gum paste flowers for the spray that would be part of the topper. Guys, I think I’ve found my calling. I want to follow the path of Nicholas Lodge and become an expert at making gum paste flowers. I LOVE making the flowers. They aren’t quite finished at this point…

We also covered our cake board and dummy cakes with fondant. This was probably the most challenging part. You know, me and fondant don’t get along so well…this was no exception. It was crazy though, because it was too sticky (wet) to roll out and then too dry to put on the cake. Very frustrating. So I’m not terribly proud of my fondant abilities, but the overall cake still came out okay. We also used an embossing stamp to make a nice edge to the cake board. And I’m sorry these pictures will never really show you what the color of the fondant really was. I wasn’t too thrilled about the color scheme to begin with, but it grew on me…and the color looks nicer in real life. Promise.
We used a bead marker on the middle tier for some pearl dragees (sp?) to be put in the holes.
Oh, and here they are:
  Once we finished, painted and steamed the flowers, we put them together in their spray/arrangement
LOVE THEM.

The flowers sit in a pressed sugar base. These were made for us, but we piped the designs onto them. This is cornelli lace work on the vase. Or at least, my attempt at cornelli lace work ;)

We also made a gum paste broach to go on the top tier. Once all the elements were done, we got to work on getting them all on the cake We also worked on some nice borders, but you’ll see those on the finished cake. We learned how to make fondant drapes for this cake. Oh my goodness I love the way it looks. I may have to become a pro at those too… ;)
Doesn’t look so elegant? I love it. We finished off the edges with some bows at the meeting points of each drape. We put our flowers in the vase, and we were done!
Oh yeah, we made some cute little butterflies too:
Love love LOVE my flowers!! :)
And here you are! Ha ha, kind of. The bows were still soft, so they have some supports on them. Just imagine they aren’t there. ;) I managed to get this home on the train, and got lots of stares as I made my way to the train station. Hee hee too fun.
Next week we start with celebration cakes. I’ve seen a little bit of the kinds of things we’re going to be doing and I’m pretty excited!!

Thanks for keeping up with me and my adventures!