Weddingbee Blog

I started baking cakes for serious about… two years ago? for the sole reason that I wanted to be able to make my own wedding cake. Yes, I am obsessive. And not engaged yet. And since you asked, here’s what I think about it:

Baking is HARD. Baking cakes is fraught with pitfalls: I was a pretty prolific cookie/brownie baker to begin with, but I wasn’t prepared for the sheer variety of things that can go wrong. Cakes that come out lumpy are hard to trim–you’ll see videos of experts just whipping them around on a turntable while holding a knife and, hey presto, the inevitable center dome is gone. Try doing that in real life. You’ll end up with a sticky knife and a pile of cake shreds. It takes practice to do it like they do; they make it look easy because they’ve done it hundreds of times. There’s all kinds of advice out there about how to keep the cake from doming so much. It works a little bit, but trimming will still be necessary. Cake is also easy to overbake, resulting in tough, dry cake. You can make cake that’s underbaked and falls in the middle. You can have it crumble as you try to get it out of the pan, unless you use Pam, which makes the cake taste funny, and/or parchment rounds, which are great for the bottom of the cake but do nothing for the sides. It can crumble if you try to transfer it to cooling racks. It can crumble after you’ve frosted it, as you try to transfer it to its final surface. And you WILL want to transfer it, because unless you are a damn CAKE MAGICIAN, there will be frosting and crumbs littering the surface around it. It can help to have cardboard cake rounds the size of your cake under the cake, so that you can move it from the decorating area without losing quite so much cake integrity, but still: expect disaster the first few times you do it.

And money. Getting pans in different sizes to do a tiered cake? Not cheap. A set of 6, 8, 10, and 12 inch round pans–one of each–is $40 on Amazon. You will want two sets, because you want to be able to bake both parts of each layer at the same time. Oh, yeah. Each tier needs to be at least two layers or it will look kind of funky, like the step pyramid of cakes. And if you bake them separately, you run the risk of messing them up in different ways. Much better to mess them up consistently.

Smoothing buttercream? Smoothing buttercream is a bitch, not to put too fine a point on it. Again, experts make it look so easy. I have tried that. I have tried that, with different spatulas, on different cakes, and every time so far (on at least half a dozen cakes), it comes out looking like I turned a four-year-old loose in a sandbox. I’ve tried crumb coats. I’ve tried homemade frosting and storebought frosting. I am still not good at it.

And don’t even get me started on ganache. At least ganache is a topping that actually tastes good. Unless you screw it up and there are big chunky crystals.

If you start trying to make cakes shortly before your wedding, they will not come out the way you envision them. They will, in all likelihood, be lumpy and weird-looking, with ill-fitting layers (because you didn’t take the experts’ advice and trim them neatly, did you? you discovered it was a pain in the butt. you put the two domed sides together and you thought, “oh, the frosting will level that out.” NO IT WON’T) that slump to one side as the day goes on. The frosting will have crumbs in it. The frosting will not look as paper-smooth as that expert’s.

My take on baking wedding cakes, after years of practicing doing it myself, is this: if you have the kind of time and money I had to invest in this, which basically involved becoming a pretty awesome amateur baker, go for it. Despite my many failures, I have made some freaking awesome cakes. (Homemade fondant cakes are easier in some ways than buttercream, but you still DEFINITELY want to practice with them. Google “marshmallow fondant.” Also, fondant tastes like sugary death.) I am not particularly worried that, in another two years or so, when we actually get married, I won’t be able to put together a badass tiered cake by virtue of my eighty bucks worth of pans, fifty bucks worth of piping tips, parchment paper, cake rounds, fancy cake lifter, spatulas, and (at that point) four years of experience with cake-baking. (If you want to learn how to pipe, that’s another undertaking altogether.) Hell, my Christmas party cake that’s still sitting on the table was badass, and that’s just two eight-inch-round brownies with the Magnolia Bakery recipe for red velvet frosting in between with crushed peppermint sticks and a Martha Stewart stencil on the top in powdered sugar. That’s my B-game, at this point.

But if becoming an amateur baker isn’t one of your life’s goals, get a professional. I am deadly serious. Baking is too much of a pain in the ass to do it unless you really, really love it.

…my boyfriend says that I should summarize this as “It is harder than you think. Try a practice one first.”

I toyed with the idea of making our cakes because I was in love with the look of fondant and the only nearby bakery that offers it closes for the entire month of August. My first trial cake with store bought frosting looked fantastic - I was even able to replicate the box that was featured on the model cake on the front of the box…unfortunately, that was when I learned that store bought fondant tastes terrible. I was about to give up on my plans when I read about Marshmallow fondant - it’s mostly marshmallows and sugar (both of which are delicious) so I thought surely Marshmallow fondant would be delicious…not so much and I actually found it harder to work with and it didn’t turn out looking so nice. So if we’re not having fondant, then I’m willing to let it go and just let a bakery make our cakes
I think kristophine makes it sound a lot harder than it is - I bought a great leveling tool at Michael’s that kind of works like a giant cheese slicer and a good spreading spatula make it much easier (but I find cakes easy, but can’t make a decent batch of cookies to save my life - so she and I might just have different strengths when it comes to baking!) I definitely second the advice to do a few trial runs before even seriously considering doing your own cake.

I have the attention span of a gnat sometimes so shiny objects (like blogs) easily divert me lol
Yes, I do think it’s something that would drive you mad as I know you’re a perfectionist! Cakes are so tempermental to begin with and add in a rainforest in Costa Rica…TROUBLE!
Make cookies or some brownies or something that’s simple, not time or labor intensive and with easily found ingredients. That way, you’ve done the Betty Crocker thing but still have time to frolic beachside (or poolside or in the jacuzzi…).