the final chapter of the wedding cake.....

and now the final chapter can be written!



just over a week ago (last Thursday, to be exact) this is how the cakes looked.

On Wednesday I had taken them all out of the freezer and put a glaze layer on them all after trimming so the tops were flat.

Thursday morning, I did the "fill", putting in the raspberry jam (seedless, of course) and stacked them up.

So far so good!









and so we begin to ice.

Three full batches of buttercream frosting (all faintly flavored with almond).

The tier that I expected to be a problem (the chocolate one) went quite well, the jam glaze served well and the icing went on easily.

The same could not be said for the smallest layer. In fact, at one point I wondered if we would end up having to bake a whole new top tier, but it finally came together.

We used mostly white -- a shell border around the bottom and a sort of star border around the top. Then scroll work across the top and cascading down the front of the cakes. Lots of the white roses that I had spent a Sunday afternoon creating, then little "vines" of pale green and tiny lavendar dots here and there.




And so on Saturday afternoon we began to set it all up.

Each tier had traveled in its own individual box lined with "non slip" rubber matting. The traveling was actually safer than being in our kitchen as all of the layers arrived safely in the car and I had actually put my fingers into the icing on one of them in the kitchen and had to repair it before we packed the box.

Using 3 risers of different heights all covered with a piece of lace fabric, we set it up as a kind of spiral of cake.



But the top layer was not done giving us trouble.

In the kitchen we had made an imprint on the top of where the cake topper needed to go so we would know how to place it. Just one problem....that tier was so tender that the topper began to actually sink into the cake!

Fortunately, we traveled with a repair kit -- containers of buttercream, pre-loaded bags (with the same tips) of the colors we used, spatulas, etc., etc., but in the end it was the creative use of a broken off plastic fork that saved the day -- we broke it the right height (just a bit shorter that the cake) and inserted it into the cake just behind the flowers and scroll work on the top. It supported just enough of the weight of the cake topper that everything stayed level.

And so the saga of the wedding cake is complete. Some time I might be willing to do this again, but there are definately things I would do differently!