An Ode to Our Wedding Cake

I have recently been going through our wedding pictures so that I can finally print some out for family and friends and to hang some around the house.  The fun part about going back through these pictures (taken by the awesome Lauren Gossett) is that I feel like I get to re-live parts of the day all over again.  Today, since I've sworn off sweets for the 1000th time in my life (likely to last until the end of the day), I was really reminiscing about one thing about our wedding day in particular...


the cake!! (Yes, this is a whole post about cake...if you like sweets, the pictures alone make this read worth it...)

I have to say we got lucky in the family category.  We had a fairly strict budget for a Charleston wedding (well, for an anywhere wedding for that matter).  We were fortunate that one cost saving area would be a very crucial part of the wedding-our cake.  Luckily for us, a few years ago Chris' sister decided to follow her passion and go to pastry school.  She now works like crazy for one of the most popular wedding cake makers in Cincinnati, Ohio.  We all decided this would be the perfect opportunity for her to shine and hopefully be the start to many more cakes she would make on her own.  


Chris and I still managed to get some cake tastings in elsewhere-although we knew all along we would be using SIL (sister in law).  There's no harm in tasting...I looked through thousands of cakes to try and decide what I wanted it to look like.  SIL did too.  I knew I wanted it to be round and stacked; I knew I wanted it to have a homemade feel but with a professional appearance.  I also knew that it had to be on a cake stand.  Challenge number one for SIL was to find a cake stand that could support a cake for 150 people-not an easy task.  I thought about DIYing a stand, but there was no guarantee it would actually work-fortunately she found the perfect pedestal cake stand, and we were on track for a brilliant cake. 


The best part about having someone you love make your cake is that they will go out of their way to make it perfect and just how you want it.  We wanted our cake to be memorable and delicious.  Neither of us like cake that much, and we especially do not like wedding cake...don't ask me why, but years of boxed vanilla cake with canned icing have really made me far from a cake lover...until I had our wedding cake.  SIL went above and beyond and pretty much told us we could do anything with the flavors and icing.  After months of careful selection, we came up with a different cake for each tier.  I made a schematic for my SIL once we decided on all the flavors, and it ended up being so fun to look at it, we placed it on the cake table so people could see all the options.

My mouth is watering just remembering how delicious each tier was...all except one...which we never got to try.  Mysteriously the top tier of our cake disappeared.  We wanted to serve the whole cake because we hoped not saving the top tier would mean that SIL would bake us a fresh anniversary cake. So, an ongoing question that Chris and I have for our wedding guests is "did you try the chiffon cake with key lime curd?"  So far we've only heard that BIL had 4 pieces (key lime is apparently his favorite)-whether or not this is true we do not know...but he is the only one we know that had it...I am convinced there is a conspiracy involved...Regardless, the other 3 tiers were DIVINE.  I could eat the chocolate cake with peanut butter cream cheese/peanut butter ganache every day of my life.  Our cake was the moistest, richest, most flavorful cake I have ever put to my lips, and I know SIL could make a killing on the wedding circuit with cakes this brilliant.

The icing of the cake was a challenge in itself.  I had described an idea to my SIL that was more complicated to do than it was to describe.  Originally I thought I just wanted a Betty Crocker finish (as can be seen here Betty Crocker Icing).  But then one day if my search for "rustic wedding cakes" (because you know how rustic I am), I stumbled across this cake, and it had to be mine:

SIL studied this and attempted all kinds of techniques to obtain a similar appearance.  During the wedding week, she finally figured out a way to make something just as fabulous, and I was delighted when I finally laid eyes on the finished product.

Beyond the yumminess and gorgeousness of the cake, there were some other elements that made our cake one of my favorite parts of the day.  I spent the year before our wedding falling in love with all things fabric.  After finding my wedding dress, I decided that I wanted an eclectic, homemade, textured feel to our day to match my dress (minus the homemade element because homemade it was not).  I learned how to do all kinds of things with fabric, including making ~20 different types of fabric flowers.  

Once I made the flowers I did not know what to do with them...so, I thought instead of real flowers, fabric flowers would be perfect for the cake.  Having these flowers on the cake really tied together the rest of the reception hall elements as I had made fabric table squares for each table.  I loved how awesome the flowers looked on the cake, and it was a very safe option in a very hot room because well, fabric does not wilt... 


The whole cake table I loved.  After making 130 fabric circles for our wedding favors, I had all this excess fabric that just so happened to look like precious pendant banners.  I figured why not, and I was pretty happy with the result.

And the final element that stole my heart forever, was our cake topper.  Again, since we were on a tight budget, there was no chance we would ever be able to afford a hand painted cake topper off etsy like I had hoped.  So, I took matters into my own hands and purchased two small wooden people from Michael's for 99 cents a piece and grabbed some of my acrylic paints.  A few hours later, I had two little Chris and Brittany replicas, and I was in love.  There are some pretty fine details on these little pretties.  If you see them up close you can see the flowers on my dress and in my hair and Chris' paisley tie and messy-neat hair.  Once these two were on top of the cake, I was smitten...

And that's the story of our cake...I mean, maybe it didn't deserve an entire post, but Chris and I talk about how much we loved it all the time...I think we love it so much because so much love was poured into and because we both put ourselves into it.  Chris helped SIL make the cake, so he was very proud in how it turned out.  


Maybe we love it so much because we see a lot of our relationship in this cake-made with love, fun, unique, and better than we could have ever imagined...


A major thanks to S.I.L. Erin for all that she did to make the perfect wedding cake.

We actually made a no smashing rule, but thanks to our signature drink we had a crowd of people peer pressuring us with shouts like SMASH IT...so after sweetly feeding it to each other, I gave in and gave a little smash to win over the (probably more than tipsy) crowd.