Wedding Cake Baking - Part 1

Since this was my very first wedding cake making experience, I had practiced it a bit and knew generally how long the process was going to take. So I made a very handy timeline that laid out when I should do each part of the wedding cake baking so that I would be organized and efficient, and so that I wouldn't forget anything.

The picture on the right is the cake concept that I showed the bride.

Day One - Wednesday
- Bake all cake layers:
- 2: 12" chocolate cake layers,
- 2: 10" vanilla cake layers,
- 2: 8" chocolate cake layers

- Make lemon curd for filling the vanilla cake tier.

Day Two - Thursday
- Make Peanut-butter Buttercream
- Make Vanilla Butter Buttercream
- Split and fill all cake tiers (12" with peanut-butter, 10" with lemon curd, 8" with vanilla buttercream)
- Crumb coat all three cake tiers.

Day Three - Friday
- Frost all cakes with vanilla buttercream and then cover with white fondant

Day Four - Saturday (Wedding Day)
- Assemble cake stand
- Make floral cake topper and base
- Box cakes up for transport to wedding venue
- Assemble cake on location and place flowers in the spacer between the top two tiers.

This timeline actually worked out really well and had time budgeted into it so that I actually had time to bake and decorate a cake for an event on Sunday (more on that later) and do unexpected things like find flowers for the cake and pick up the parents from the airport when they came to town unexpectedly.

I would say that if you were going to be working on the cake full time (as in not going to work for 8 hours a day and then commencing baking afterward) you could definitely condense this into a shorter time period.

And I know some of you might be thinking "eating cake that was baked 4 days ago is probably not very good". Well I kinda thought the same thing when I started this project. But that is why I did practice cakes and picked recipes that were moist, but more about the specific cake recipes later.

All in all, I would say that this project went fairly smoothly and I would most likely attempt it again.