If you’ve missed any of my cake baking adventures so far, check out these posts first:

• Welcome to cake-bakin’ week!
• Bake til you drop
• Wear your crumbcoat
• Star of the stripes

The wedding was on Saturday, and as you read this the bride and groom are sunning it up in Mexico for their honeymoon.

Jeff and I spent yesterday doing absolutely nothing. Pajamas all day. With a stressful week of cake-baking, trafficky travel, and wedding festivities – we were beat. Here’s how it all went down…

We arrived at the wedding venue, Tennessee River Place, to an amazing pastoral scene. Big fluffy buffalo and strutting geese dotted the green grass.

There was an intense storm the day before so the ground was still wet. The overcast sky meant that the wedding and reception would be moved indoors rather than at the riverfront.

I had the good luck of getting an entire industrial kitchen to myself to finish the cake. I completely underestimated how long it would take to finish up, so I was scrambling a bit to get it all done before I needed to go get myself dressed and ready.

The first thing I did was fix a few cracks and flaws in the fondant. The drive to the wedding site was unpaved and the gravel had the cakes sliding all over the place in the car. It’s amazing what a little vegetable shortening will do though. You can put a little on your finger and rub it in circles over a crack and it will largely disappear! I did that all over and with the exception of a few deeper dings, it smoothed out nicely.

Then I got to work on cutting and inserting the 4 support dowels…

I had to take those two on the right out again and cut them down to cake level. I also took the bottom cake layer off of its transport base and glued it to the decorative stand with a little buttercream.

I put the second layer on top, wrapped the bases in ribbon, and started postioning the topper accents.

I used some cut roses to make a floral crown to fill out the top. I just cut the stems short and angled and pushed them right into the cake. I fluffed the flowers up a little by pulling the petals open a bit.

And…………………………….wait for it………………….here it is!!!

And a close-up of that floral crown…

Squeee!!!! 😀

I left it in the kitchen and went to go get dressed. Jeff was not a huge fan of his groomsman outfit, but I thought he looked handsome.

About an hour later, it was time for the ceremony!

Yay! Another Tucker girl enters the family!

Everyone filed out and we headed straight into dinner.

We were served barbecue, but not some sloppy greasy hole-in-the wall barbecue, this was really nice and tasted great.

But who cares about dinner, you wanna see cake right?

Tada!

Isn’t Kevin’s groom cake awesome? It’s not even covered in fondant! I can’t believe they were able to get buttercream that smooth.

Here’s a close-up of mine again…

And then the part that I knew was coming but couldn’t prepare for, cutting it! I’ll admit that it was a little heart-wrenching to watch it get hacked up, but by that time I was pretty ready to move on to the part of my life where I don’t have to think about cake 24 hours a day, so I wasn’t too sad to see it go.

And it tasted great too. I love both of the recipes I used for the cake and for the buttercream. I’ve had so many wedding cakes with sickeningly sweet crusty icing and bland textureless cake.

Mine was a little firmer and thicker like a sugar cookie cake and had a delicious buttery flavor. The buttercream was soft and velvety and while it was certainly very sweet, it wasn’t a diabetic coma waiting to happen. 😉

The bride and groom loved the cake, which was all I needed to hear. I got many complements that evening and I was so proud. Last week while I was going crazy putting this thing together I was sure I’d never do it again. Now though, I’ve learned so many tips for how to make it easier next time that I think I could see myself having another go at it.

Thanks for following me on this journey! I have learned so much about this process and I’m really happy with what I did.

Well, the wedding was last night and before you just die of suspense I’ll go ahead and tell you that the cake turned out beautifully and tasted delicious!

Today though, I wanna show you the last few steps in preparing the cake for it’s trip.

When we left off, I was finishing up frosting over the crumbcoat and was rolling out the white fondant to cover them.

I didn’t get any pictures of me covering the cakes in fondant because…well…I didn’t have any hands free! Jeff was home from work early because he had to pick up his tux that afternoon so he helped me to pick up the delicate yet heavy fondant and drape it over the cakes. Then I went to work on smoothing it out with my hands and cutting off the excess. When covered, I let them harden up in the fridge so that I could smooth the fondant some more without squishing dents in it.

I ended up using the entire 5 pounds of white fondant I had just to cover both cakes, so I had to run to the cake art supply store less than an hour before they closed to pick up more! I was beat by this point, but I had to get the fondant I was going to use to decorate with dyed that night if I was gonna have enough time to finish before we had to leave the next day.

Jeff and I spent an hour kneading fondant together to fully incorporate the dyes, our forearms were so sore after that! But this is what we came out with…

Friday morning was frantic. I got up and went straight to work on decorating. Jeff helped me to pull our table out of the dining room and into the kitchen so that I could shut the cats out and focus on work.

I started by rolling out the colored fondant as thinly as I could with the table dusted in powdered sugar to keep it from sticking. I used a pizza cutter and the edge of a ruler to cut wide bands of both pink shades.

I laid out the darker pink first, trying to postion the stripes over any unfixable flaws.

Then the lighter pink between those. I wasn’t adhering them at this point, just positioning so that I knew how many stripes I needed and how they would lay.

I rolled and cut the purple fondant into thin little strips and added those between the pink. Then I used an exacto knife to cut the excess pieces off the top of the cake so that the stripes fit together like tiles and made a nice flat top.

When everything was cut and positioned, I lifted each one up one by one and painted the bottoms with a little water and smoothed them into place. Water slightly dissolves fondant, making a sticky slurry that glues the stripes down to the base layer.

That was all that I could finish at home. Jeff and I rushed to clean the kitchen, pack our bags, get dressed, load the car, set out food for the cats…..AHHH! We barely made it out the door in time!

I cannot wait to show you what this looks like all put together tomorrow, it was incredible if I do say so myself.

The big reveal is tomorrow!

Man, I thought all-day-baking Wednesday was hard, but yesterday takes the cake! HA! 😀

Yeah, that really is my sense of humor, sorry.

So you saw that I got all the baking done, and now it was time to carve the cakes and cover them in delicious buttercream. I started by trimming the edges and then removing all the brown crust. If I were just making a birthday cake or something I would leave the brown bits, but wedding cakes are expected to be more pristine so I removed it.

Trimming and shaping the cakes was a task that I expected to take about 30 minutes or so. Ha! Try a few hours! It was warm in our kitchen and the buttercream was getting soft and moving the cake layers around as I cut them, so I had to keep returning the cake to the fridge to set back up again.

The second one was easier, it just decided to behave for me for some reason.

Next up, crumbcoating.

A crumbcoat is a really thin layer of frosting that seals in the crumbs, seals in the moisture, makes a smooth and even surface, and holds the layers in place. It’s essentially edible glue.

First, you generously apply buttercream to the cake.

And then you scrape it all off!

I like to use a dough scraper tool because it has a hard edge the drags smoothly across the cake surface. (This is my favorite part of the whole process, I could crumbcoat all day and be happy.)

These got sent to the fridge to chill out for a while and let the buttercream crust.

Then you do it again!

You frost right over the crumbcoat heavily and then use the same tool to scrape it off again, but this time apply less pressure so that you leave more frosting behind. I didn’t get a picture of the finished frosting though, by this point I was getting off schedule for the next step so I wasn’t really thinking about pictures too much.

Protip: Make sure to get the frosting pristinely smooth as any slight imperfections will show up through the fondant layer.

Speaking of fondant, I am (dis)pleased to introduce you to my nemesis…

Fondant and I don’t get along so well. It’s partially because I’m a little weakling that has a hard time rolling it out thin enough and partly because the stuff is just so delicate and finicky and needs a lot of care to look smooth and nice.

I got it done though, and today I’ll be finishing up the last bits of decorating. The whole thing won’t come together though until the day of the wedding (Saturday) so it’ll be in pieces til then.

I’ll make sure to show the rest of the steps and the finished product soon!