Sunday, July 29, 2012

Red Velvet Wedding Cake

About a month ago I was asked to make a wedding cake under very unusual circumstances. This couple was having a very low-key, non-traditional wedding. They weren't going to have a cake or decorations or family, just a grandparent as a witness and not much else. I work with the groom, and he asked me how much it would cost to get an 8" round red velvet cake for that day. I was excited because, as I mentioned in this post, I had been looking for an excuse to learn to make RVC. (You can get the recipe there as well, which uses beets as dye instead of food coloring.) I was also excited because it was my first wedding cake that I was hired to do. The problem was, I was heading home to New Jersey a week before the wedding.

Well, we happen to work in a grocery store bakery and we know that you can freeze a cake and it's still pretty good.  Like I said, they weren't going to have a cake anyway so this was better than nothing. Then came the next kicker - RVC is his bride's favorite cake. She absolutely loves it - with rainbow chip icing??? Yep, not cream cheese or even regular buttercream but rainbow chip. This was quickly becoming the strangest first-wedding-cake experience ever.

Being the person I am, I wanted to give them a gift as well - so instead of a just an 8" I also made a 6" tier for the top. The day I was leaving for NJ, I delivered this cake to the store where we work. Of course I kept the tiers separate and gave instructions on how to stack it. Unfortunately, it was one of those 100 degree days and the buttercream started to melt. I was hoping someone at the store would be able to fix the border before he took it, but I guess that never panned out. He had to attempt to fix it himself. So here is the picture of the first wedding cake I've made, with an obvious boo-boo. I didn't take the picture. In fact, this is a picture of the picture that the groom brought in afterwards.


It is unfortunate that I wasn't there to stack it properly, fix the icing, etc. You can see the spot with no border, but those two "shells" to the right of it were his attempt and I guess he gave up haha. Like I said, anything was better than no cake. I do wish they had gotten a picture from the good side and I feel bad but he knew that I wasn't going to be there to put it together and the top tier was a gift, not something he was paying for. If you ignore that bit, though, I was really happy with the way it turned out.

Congratulations!

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