What do you get when you combine an edible 24k gold painted ‘sequin’ cake with a flurry of pink fondant ruffles and a simple white tier edged with a golden band? This glamorous wedding cake we created for the lovely Jenny and Dan’s wedding day out in the countryside of East Yorkshire a little while ago!
Glamorous wedding cake alert!
We’ve become quite famous (or infamous?) for our metallic sequins and wonderfully textured ruffles. All completely edible by the way! It all began with this peony ruffle cake (which a lovely client called ‘iconic’ lately) and since then we’ve created a blue ombré & gold sequin cake, a winter themed macaron tower cake, these sequin bauble cupcakes, a couture inspired sequin cupcake, a super pretty ruffled chalkboard wedding cake, a Marchesa lace inspired wedding cake and we’ve got countless frilled and sequin embellished designs booked in for 2016-17!
We paint all our gold elements with edible 24k gold that is completely safe to consume (hence edible) and also super luxurious too. We get a lot of emails and calls asking for the brand of gold we use but it’s important to remember what works for us may not be what works for you! We researched brands, mixes, ratios, drying times, paintbrushes, etc etc for almost 1 year until we found what worked utterly perfectly for our work.
The day before the wedding the bride, Jenny, gave us their wedding topper for us to set up with the wedding cake at the venue. It’s definitely sweet and fun and stands out really well on top of the three luxurious tiers. The bolder colour helped set the whole cake off and create more of a focal point too. Plus we loved the playfulness of it once it was added.
Now lets talk about ruffles. Fabulous fondant frills (apologies for the alliteration) became the latest thing in the cake world a few years ago thanks to Maggie Austin. We worked on developing our own which were super frilly and fluffy for what felt like an age. A lot of ruffles look similar to delicate baked pastry sheets, but we wanted ours to be a little more fashion inspired (think Ralph & Russo or Monique Lhuillier). It took a while to work out our current method and it generally takes a lot of fondant and a whole lot more hours to ruffle just one tier, but it sure is worth it in the end.
For Jenny and Dan’s wedding cake they had a gorgeous pink color palette, but wanted their bold pink topper to stand out. We tinted our fondant a blush pink and began the process. Creating ruffles in ombré is very chic indeed, but you’ll get an amazing play of light and shade with ruffles all the same tint. In amidst the fondant frills are deeper blush pinks and on the surface are pale pinks… all from the same colour.
Ah the 24k gold painted band around the top tier… this was inspired by one of Ron Ben-Israel‘s signature styles or techniques where elegant and simple golden bands wrap around towering cakes. For the band we measured the circumference (we even double check with he good ol’ C=πxD formula just incase), tinted our fondant a good ochre or caramel colour and sourced super sharp blades. To cut out fonts, stripes or thin bands we use surgical scalpels as they’re the thinest and sharpest tools we’ve found yet; it also helps to have a damn steady hand and possibly the ability to hold your breath for a good length of time.
We’re aware that we may say this about every cake we create, but we’re always sad to see them leave. This pretty little number was hard to leave behind once we set it up with 100 mouth-watering macarons (in Cherry Kirsch, Strawberries & Champagne, Salted Caramel and Pistachio) at The Gardener’s Country Inn.
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