Flower and Butterfly Wedding Party Cake

Well, I sure have a lot of catch-up to do in order to get this blog up to date!

Since I thought I’d go more-or-less sequentially, what better place to start than with the cake that started it all!

My brother was getting married a few summers ago, so I thought I’d make them a cake as a present.  I’ve been baking with my mom since I could reach the counter, but I’d never tried either stacking a cake or working with fondant.  Did that stop me?  No!  Should I have practiced first?  Perhaps!  (In my defence, this wasn’t for their actual wedding day – we held a big party at my parents’ house a month or so before the wedding.)

In preparation for the big event, I went out and bought Rose Levy-Beranbaum‘s book “The Cake Bible“.  Indeed, it is a bible for all things cake-y, and if you’re interested in learning how to make fancy cakes, this book should be on your shelf (after you’ve read it, of course).  I haven’t made nearly all the recipes yet, though it sounds like a tasty project.

Anyway, armed with my book of instructions, I dove right in.  The experience was, admittedly, a little frustrating and nerve-wracking at times, but after all the flour and icing sugar was wiped away, I was pretty pleased with the final results!

The flower garland and topper are real, and I bought the little fabric butterfly.

This was long enough ago that I still used my film camera, and I was annoyed to discover when I got the pictures developed that I’d had black and white film in my camera!  Luckily, another member of my family had taken this shot of my brother and his wife with the cake.  🙂

The cake itself was lemon with blueberry mousse.  Yum!