Tiers of happiness - part 2

At the end of part 1 - we had got as far as the wedding cake being baked and ready for it's posh dressing up.  Eventually it looked like this:

It wasn't really as wonky as it looked in the photo.  But I'm getting ahead of myself. The cake needed icing, and it needed marzipan before that. The cakes were almost flat so I didn't bother to trim them. I checked them with my culinary spirit level (yes really) and neither of the three were that far out so I thought it would all be fine.  The traditional glue for sticking marzipan to cakes is apricot jam, but I had some marmalade in the cupboard so I used that instead, two parts marmalade to one part water, warm in a mug in the microwave and apply with a pastry brush. The marzipan was rolled out, draped over each cake and smoothed down with icing sugar dusted hands and sort of massaged until it was as smooth as I could get it. Sort of like beauty therapy for cakes!  They were left to dry out overnight before icing.

The icing was applied in a similar fashion (nearly 2 kilos of it for the three cakes!) except that it was stuck to the marzipan with vanilla vodka rather than marmalade glaze.  Yes, the vodka happened to be hanging around too. I used ready made sugarpaste icing from the cake decorating shop rather than making it, which I don't think is cheating really... After some judicious trimming and much smoothing out, and a second beauty therapy for cakes session, the three cakes were suitably enrobed in their double cloaks of marzipan and icing and left to dry for a few more days.

My daughter had decided she wanted to decorate them, so one day while I was at work she spent most of a day being creative.  Using our new piping nozzles, and a LOT of red food colouring paste, butter and icing sugar, and an amazing amount of creativity and general cleverness, she ended up with several different designs of flowers in shades of pink and red around the edges of the larger two cakes, and completely covering the smallest one. At one point she diced with disaster by having the cakes overhanging the edge of the work surface, but didn't notice until she looked at the photos afterwards!  Meanwhile, I spent my lunch break buying two and a half metres of red ribbon.  The colour of the washing up water had to be seen to be believed!

After reading about it in the cake bible, we had decided to use shot glasses for pillars, which worked really well.  As the cakes were heavy, we had to order thick milkshake straws online which were cut down and inserted into the bottom two cakes to help support the shot glasses.

Assembly was left until the big day, just before the cake was cut. It wasn't perfectly straight, and in photos it looks worse than in reality (camera angles can be so unkind), but nobody minded, and most importantly the bride and groom were happy with it.  I nearly missed the cake cutting, being in the middle of a conversation with my uncle in the pantry, and everyone had to shout my name to find me!!  All was well in the end though. I was most impressed when the whole bottom tier was eaten on the wedding day; but then, this IS my family we are talking about! It was a bit crumbly due to the gluten free nature, but the taste and lack of dodgy tummies afterwards in those susceptible more than made up for it.

Thank you for reading.  Hopefully more soon.

Caroline.