Red, White & Bling: Tales of a cross country wedding cake

Over Easter weekend, we had the opportunity to create a wedding cake for my cousin Juliet's wedding.

I was really honored that she trusted us with such a momentous occasion in her life but I was a bit nervous for two reasons. First, her wedding was on the other side of the country- Texas, far away from our base in New Jersey. Baking away from my lab* is always challenging because you never know what you’re going to need and you pretty much have to uproot your entire bakery and ship things across the country.. I often wonder how competitors on Cupcake Wars do it. I truly respect them.

Notwithstanding that fear, at Bims', we're always up for a challenge (thanks for teaching me to be fearless mom!)- Sooooo Texas? BRING IT ON! :o)

My second fear was…I knew if I messed up, she knew how and where to find me...lol

So....six months in advance, I started sketching.

Sketch #1....(Thank you EverNote/Penultimate!)

She's not a 'cake person' per se...so she had no clue what she wanted. She only had 3 requirements:

(1) "RED VELVET CAKE PLEASE!"

(2) Stick to the color scheme (red, black and white)  and ....

(3) A LOT of bling! She just wanted 'bling'. 

The rest was up to us.

 

We sent her a few ideas and some were 'yes', 'sure', 'ok', 'no', etc.....So back to the drawing board we went....

Randomly, in the car, on the train, everywhere, I'd look around for inspiration...I thought about her personality…

If you know my cousin Jules, you'll know that she's a fun loving person who never fails to make me laugh everytime we hang out. I also know she's not so traditional. She's somewhere at the corner of traditional and contemporary.....now how was I going to translate that to a cake?.....*insert confused face*

The beauty of ordering your cakes in advance is that you give yourself and your baker/cake designer (like how I just gave myself that new title? J) time to change the design. You can sleep on it and wake up and decide you don't like this.

Now, side bar: adding crystals a.k.a 'bling' to a wedding cake is pretty BUT I also thought about the wedding pictures….you don't want to blind your photographer…right?

 

After we went through a few sketches, I came up with what I thought was okay- though it wasn't so 'Jules'...It was pretty much the sketch above- just different colored tiers (I just want to add that this is why I did not major in arts in college...creativity is clearly not my strongest point).

I showed this to my partner and he suggested that I made tier #3 smaller. My reaction was a very thoughtful, “hmmm”.

  

So I sketched again using his suggestions......and VOILA! That was it! This was more "Jules" to me.... I was so excited........(if you can't already tell, cakes excite me but that's a story for another day :o) )

 

Smaller "tier #3"



I transferred the sketch to our handy cake design software (WeddingCakeDesignPro).

Later on, my partner said "why don't we make the top tier red and the flowers on top white?" (seriously, where was this man all my life?)

  Here are a few pictures of the process:


Top 3 tiers

Tier 1 and 2

 And there you have it! The final product! Numerous sketches later:

Juliet's cake!

Flavors included:

• Red velvet cake with Vanilla swiss meringue buttercream
• French vanilla cake with Vanilla swiss meringue buttercream and 
• Red velvet cake with white chocolate swiss meringue buttercream. 



The personalized cake topper had the couple's initials.

Of course, we had to add some bling to it :o)



"Backstage"

 

                             Jules and her husband Uche loved the cake! :o)

 

Congrats to my dear cousin Jules and my new brother-in-law Uche!

There you have it...........Tales of a cross country wedding cake :o)

Lots of 'sweet' hugs from our "lab" to yours J

PS. *our cake lab = our kitchen