Making of: Grenzbrück Wedding Cake

Lately, I was asked to make a cake for a LARP-wedding (weird people in kind of historic costumes acting being people from fictive countries...). The two characters who married were two of the most importent people of the aristocratic world within Grenzbrück, so that elements from both's coat of arms' can be found on the cake.
When the people who organised the event talked about decorating the tables I somehow mentioned edible decoration made of royal icing and fondant.

So the things I started with was the decoration because the royal icing has to dry for several days. 

The 'wedding' was to take place on a Saturday, so we (K. and I) started piping the blue cornflowers. Actually, we only did the outlines and the outline of the centre. It took us about three hours to pipe 138 of them.

On Wednesday my boyfriend and the 'bridegroom' sat together while I was at work and worked green foodcolour into roughly 1 kg of white fondant to make oak leaves. This process took about three hours as well.
Thanks a lot to both of you!

Here are all the cornflowers plus one out of three trays full of oak leaves.

So much for the decoration. On Tuesday I started baking the four cakes. Therefore, I used Peggy Porschen's basic recipe from "Pretty Party Cakes". For the four cakes in total you need four basic recipes.

1 3/4 for the 30 cm (12 inches) cake
1 1/4 for the 26 cm (10 inches) cake
3/4 for the 18 cm (7 inches) cake
1/4 for the 12 cm (5 inches) cake

But do not try to put it all together into one blender! It is way too much!

I made a vanilla flavoured cake for the top and the bottom tier (30 and 12 cm), which makes two basic recipes and a 'normal' cake for the other two tiers. I did not put any special flavour in because of the different creams that I used for each. But first about the cakes and about the creams later :)

One basic recipe that is:

400 g butter
400 g sugar
8 medium eggs (only 6 if they are large)
400 g flour (since I have not found the required self-raising flour here in Germany, yet, I add 2 teaspoons baking powder)

Mix the butter with the sugar, then add the eggs one by one. Finally, mix the flour with the baking powder and add it to the mixture. This mixture is enough for a round 22cm baking pan. Preheat the oven to 175°C and bake the cake for about 40 minutes. It may take a bit longer, so do not forget to poke a toothpick into the middle and check whether it comes out clean, before you finish baking it.

Leave each cake to cool for several hours. Then, slice it into so many layers as possible. Depending on the size of the cake the amount of layers varies between three and five.

I filled the bottom tier and the top tier with dark chocolate ganache. For both cakes you need

900 g dark chocolate (at least 55%)
800 g single cream

Soak each layer with sugar syrup (flavoured to taste) and than spread ganache onto it. Pile all the layers and then coat the whole cake with the remaining ganache.

The cakes should look like this.

My boyfriend thought of putting a sprite bottle next to the largest cake to show how big the cake is.

Here are all four cakes. Two of them covered with chocolate ganache and the other two not filled and covered, yet.

This is the cheese buttercream-strawberry cake.

The cheese buttercream (250 g butter, 500 g confectioner's sugar, 125 g curd)

The cheese cream cake half covered...

... and fully covered
Between the first two layers there is strawberry preserve, the other layers are spread with the cheese cream.

 This is the bottom layer of the lemon buttercream cake, covered with apricot preserve.

Here are 250 g butter and the zest of three lemons. Add 250 g confectioner's sugar and mix very well and you get a yummie lemon buttercream. 

Top layer covered in marzipan and fondant.

More fondant...

The top layer with loads of fondant leaves and calla lilies. Still missing: a soft pink rose with golden borders.

The bottom layer

The cheesecream cake with oak leaves

 

To pile the cakes I use these aluminium pipes.

See here.

Here is the rose on top. Oh, by the way. I piped royal icing between all the layers and coloured it with edible gold dust. 

Some of the cornflowers broke while putting them into or out of the box I used for the transport, so I thought why not using them as saddles for the horses :)

Here you can see the gold dust on the borders and on the oak leaves as well. 

The oak leaves above and the cornflowers below were also used as edible decoration on the tables. 

And here is the whole thing.

A friend of mine also took some pictures during the celebration and kindly allowed me to include them in my blog.
Thanks to Thomas Michalski (http://www.thomas-michalski.de/) for these wonderful pictures!

The next big projects are already being planned, but first there will be three smaller projects in February. On February 4th there will be cake pops, so stay tuned :)