Wedding Blog

Part 1: To Bake a Cake

I just want to take a second to thank everyone for their super sweet feedback on my labor of love a.k.a. my wedding cake:

Really, I cannot believe how ridiculously supportive all of your comments were.

It means SO MUCH to me.

That said, I have to get to the logistics – gasp! Again, I will start by saying that I do not recommend that anyone bake their own wedding cake unless they have experience and/or equipment, and here’s why – gulp! All said, I would estimate that making my own cake cost me – GUH!

$350!!!

It’s CRAZY, I know! Please, allow me to explain.

First, equipment:

• Pans - Because I am rather spastic, I literally did not decide what sizes my tiers would be until the day I baked the cake (the Wednesday before the wedding). Therefore, during the year’s time that elapsed between the big decision and the big wedding, I bought: 1-6”, 2-8”, 1-10”, 1-12”, 1-14”, and 1-16” pan for a total of $86.
  In the end, my tiers were 8-10-14 and I could have spent closer to $35.
• Caddies – I bought a 14” caddy for each layer (3 caddies, $8/ea. = $24).
  Incidentally, the 14” caddy is actually too small for a 14” cake, so I ended up transporting the 14” cake on the upside-down 16” cake pan (oh, hey, look, I guess I did use it)!
• Cake release - $7 - As it turns out, this by itself was by far the best way to get a clean cake out of the pans I was using.
• Icing bags – I spent a whopping $4 on these puppies, but let me point out – Ziploc bags serve the same purpose for marginal cost.
• Fondant dye - $15 - Oh, uhh, again, I’m spastic – so I bought every color of the rainbow, including several shades of green and several shades of red.
• Icing spatula - $6, and did I need it? No. But did I enjoy feeling like a real baker because of it? Yessuh.
• Fondant smoother - $5 and worth every penny. This is just a flat piece of plastic with a handle, but it helps to push the fondant against the icing when you lay it on the cake.
• Fondant cutter/embosser - $4 – When I bought this, I thought it was useless… it’s like a mini pizza-cutter. However, when I tried cutting thin strips of fondant for my middle layer with anything else, I failed, so I guess little Mr. Fondant-Cutter proved me wrong.
• Pearl dust - $8 - Again, I bought several colors – and ended up using it ONLY for the fondant balls around the edges.
• Fondant rolling pin- $7 – Useful only for making the fondant super thin. Also, I used the rounded end of it to make the curly edges of my gum paste “calla lilies.”
• 10” leveler – For $3, you can set this leveler to a certain height, and like a cheese slicer, it’s supposed to level the top of your cake. Honestly, I think a bread knife and some patience works better.
• Fondant cutter sets – I bought two cookie-cutter-like sets to make the cutouts for the middle layer of the cake for a total of $6. One was various sizes of a spiky flower, and the other were various sizes of leaves. I made the dots using the end of a straw, and the strips of fondant were cut out with the cutter/embosser.

So, folks, there you have it - $175 spent on JUST EQUIPMENT. If I could do it again, I would: a) figure out what pans I needed beforehand, b) figure out what fondant colors I wanted beforehand, and c) just plain not buy the leveler, the pearl dust, and the icing bags.

Next, cake materials:

• Fondant – This was, by far, the biggest expense. And, had I not needed a ridiculous amount of practice, I would have spared myself quite a bit of that expense. However, I would say that, including trials and the final cake, I spent about $80 on fondant. At Michael’s, you can get a 5 lb. box for $20, so I probably went through about 20 pounds of fondant… which is ridiculous. For the actual cake, I think I used about 8 pounds of fondant for an 8-10-14, 5” high tiers (but don’t hold me to that – there are several websites that provide guidelines, and this is one of them).
• Gum paste - $5 for an 8 oz. pack which I used to make the “calla lilies.”
• Cake mixes – $40 - This included all my taste testing and trials. For my final cake, I used 8 boxes of strawberry cake for the top two layers and 6 boxes of pound cake for the bottom layer.
• White chocolate chips, sugar, cream cheese, eggs, and raspberry pie filling - $50 to make some pretty yummy homemade frostings/fillings.

So that makes $175 spent on cake materials.

And then finally, the details on how that sucker got to the wedding:

• Wednesday, I did all the supply-buying and cake-baking. I frosted those suckers up, cleared out the majority of my fridge, and let them sit overnight in the fridge (I’m pretty sure this is recommended – but I’m not a baker).
• Wednesday night, I drew a bunch of sketches of what I wanted the middle layer to look like, and I hated them all. I finally decided that I could not live without a damask pattern, so I cut myself a little damask stencil.
• Thursday morning – oh, did I mention I still didn’t know how this was going to get safely to Maine? Anyway, Thursday morning, I mixed my fondant with dye to get the colors I was looking for.
  Quick tip: nuking the fondant for 10-20 seconds makes it more pliable, but also stickier (so have corn starch or confectioner’s sugar on hand).
  By the time I was done, I kid you not, I had blisters on the palms of my hands.
• Thursday afternoon, I attempted my damask pattern. It was a failure. I just did not have the right implements to cut the pattern I was looking for (exacto knife didn’t “cut” it – hehehe GET IT?). I did, however, have some fondant cutters that I’d bought just in case, so hey, I winged it. Meanwhile, Mr. BG and his mommy rolled, like, a million little white fondant balls and shimmied them around in some pearl dust.
• Thursday night, late, I made my calla lilies out of gum paste. To make these, I just cut out leaf-patterns, mashed the edges with the rounded side of my fondant roller, rolled them up around a piece of red fondant, and let them dry in a dissected paper towel tube. Meanwhile, the Mr. BG-mommy team cut dowels to size and stuck them strategically in the bottom two layers for support.
• Friday, we packed up our three layers (two in caddies, one on an upside-down 16” pan with tinfoil tented around it), our fondant balls, an icing bag, and extra frosting. When we got it to the venue, we put it down on a 3’x3’ slab of wood that Mr. BG had painted white, stacked our layers, frosted the edges, and applied the fondant balls.
• Saturday, at some point, someone put red flower petals all around her and made her look pretty.

So there you have it – the craziness that is making your own wedding cake when equipped with nooooo experience. As I said last time, yes, I would do it again – because I am stubborn and felt like I had something to prove. And if you, like me, want to show yourself that it’s possible – or if you, unlike me, know what the heck you’re doing, then I say go for it. However, if you are looking to save more than you might spend on a pair of shoes from Payless, I say skip it.