The month after Darryl and Sarah’s wedding in August, two of my closest friends Katharine & Lewis were getting married in Suffolk. They were hoping for a very simple wedding cake & asked if I would be able to make the whole thing for them! Knowing how long I spent just decorating the previous wedding cake, I was cautious in agreeing to too much work, but Katharine and Lewis were after quite a simple design, and after some discussion and browsing through a few of my books we agreed I would make a three tiered cake with a 9″ round fruit cake, and two Victoria sponges of 8″ and 6″.

I made a small fruit cake as a trial using a new recipe (which involved lots of whisky!!) and we all loved the flavour, so I was happy with the baking I had to do. We then set our focus upon the decoration, and Katharine and I both liked some peony flowers made from modelling paste we had seen in one of my books (although we didn’t think they looked much like real peonies!) and Katharine loved some of the stenciling work we had seen too. So we decided to cover a large cake board with purple fondant icing, onto which I could stencil with white royal icing.  Luckily I had read about a powder which could be added to royal icing to give it a true white colour, & stop it looking translucent against the purple icing.  To contrast this I would stencil the top tier of the cake in purple onto the white fondant icing covering it.  I bought some edible purple dust intended to be used with stencils, but after testing it on small scraps of icing, the colour was quite dark and Katharine & I didn’t like the effect too much. So I experimented a little more using royal icing and was able to easily colour some purple for stenciling on to the top tier.  I spent a while practicing the stenciling on small pieces of fondant icing just rolled out on my table, and experimented when making the royal icing to try & find the best consistency to use with the stencils.  If the royal icing was too thin it would run underneath the stencil and if it was too thick it would be dragged up by the stencil when it was removed, creating small peaks around the edges of the pattern.

After baking all the cakes, I knew the smallest one would need to be 100% flat to allow me to get the stencil on it perfectly. I carefully leveled the two halves of the sponge before filling & sandwiching together, & attempted to flatten the top with my smoother as I covered it with icing. However I was most disappointed when I realised the top curved down around the edges & I wasn’t going to be able to lay the stencil flat. I thought it was too risky to try & use the stencil without it lying flat at the edges as I only had one chance to get it right…but luckily I had Plan B!!  I rolled more purple icing and stenciled on it with white royal icing, so it matched the cake board, and used a decorative cutter to cut out a scalloped edged circle to place in top of the cake. Afterwards I was actually really pleased with this & thought it was better than the original design, as it brought more colour to the cake & it reflected the cake board wonderfully.

The two peonies were reasonably easy to make, but each involved cutting 7 separate flower shapes, using a veining tool on them, and then folding each petal on each flower shape before being made into just one flower, so I spent almost two hours just making these two flowers! On the day of the wedding James & I set off early with the three tiers still separate, and I spent just a short while stacking the tiers and adding the finishing touches, including the ribbons. I tried to make the cake look as professional as I could, down to minor details such as having beautiful pins with little pearls on the tops to hold the ribbon in place. The wedding venue Katharine & Lewis chose was amazing, and it was another wonderful day I was privileged to have played a small part in!

3 Tier Wedding Cake with Stenciling

Both of these photos are courtesy of my friend and fabulous photographer Matt at MDphotography (www.facebook.com/mdimages) who was the official wedding photographer for Katharine and Lewis.

Katharine & Lewis’ Wedding Cake