A few months ago a professor in my department asked me if I would have any interest in making her cake for a July wedding. I’ve wanted to make a wedding cake for ages, but the right opportunity hadn’t come up before. The wedding was for 80 people in a barn overlooking Cayuga lake nearby Cornell in New York. The bride is a mycologist and requested a cake that was mushroom themed but still wedding-y. We also decided to make slightly more cake, so there would be enough for everyone to get a larger slice than usual. Two serving cakes, ten inches each, of almond sponge with raspberry jam and vanilla pastry cream filling and a vanilla swiss meringue buttercream with toasted almonds. And a two tiered (10 and 8 inch) display cake with early grey cake, lemon curd filling and vanilla buttercream with all the decorations.

Since I had never made a cake quite so big I did some practice runs. I was very fortunate that a friend of mine was turning 27 and decided to have a 27 dresses themed birthday party, so I managed to just bring the practice cake to the party and it didn’t go to waste.

The practice cake worked out pretty well, I planned to put on a lot more decoration and change how the rim of the middle tier was arranged. Not pictured are the 5 extra holes in the center of the cake from where I’d accidental put the cake support dowels in wrong….At least I learned how to do it right for the final cake.

I’d planned out pretty well a timeline of how to prepare everything. I made the fondant mushrooms, bumble bees, rocks, and lace weeks in advance. I pressed all the flowers and ferns from my garden beforehand as well.

A week in advance, I baked the cakes for 10 hours and froze them. This seems like a strange step to many people who think the cake would be better baked the day of. But freezing actually helps the cakes taste more moist and allows for better stacking. So pretty much every large cake is always baked in advance by at least a few days and sometimes up to a few months.

Finally it was time to start putting everything together. I filled and stacked the big display cake first and then frosted it and applied the lace. Despite the fact that it was 90 degrees and my ouse has no air conditioning it looked good and I popped it in the fridge to decorate and deliver the following morning. The two serving cakes came together fairly easily as well and all the components tasted amazing.

Anyways, it was around 1am on Friday (wedding on saturday afternoon) and I was feeling pretty good and ready to go to sleep until I opened the fridge to check on the display cake. And then everything went wrong. My house had been so hot during the day, that the fridge couldn’t handle it and wasn’t cold enough either. The top tier of the cake started bulging and had cracked through the side of the frosting. This was my nightmare. I sat on my kitchen floor for an hour before deciding I needed to make a new cake.

Thank god for 24 hour Wegmans. SO I went to the grocery store, bought all the ingredients and got going. My house was still about 85 degrees, so I moved my equipment to the basement where it was a few degrees cooler to frost ect. I finished around 7am which is when I discovered an air conditioner in the basement. I carried it upstairs to make a cold room in the dining room and did the rest of the decorating there. This worked a lot better and I decided I might be able to save the first cake too. I took off all the frosting on the bulging original cake and found that it was really just the frosting bulging out not the cake itself. Two wonderful friends had also come over by this point for moral support, so despite the lack of sleep I was feeling a bit better.

By around 1pm, I ended up with, not one, but two fully decorated display cakes. I wasn’t sure what to do at this point, so we just brought them both to the wedding. More cake is always better right?

The bride and groom seemed delighted and I heard very positive reviews from guests. The cakes ended up being a lot more work than expected, I think I’d rent a commercial kitchen the next time I tried to do something on this scale. But I learned so much from this experience and was so happy everything turned out at the end!