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Simple Wedding Cakes – Wedding Cake Essentials
Wedding Cake Design
The design refers to the way your cake is built. For an old-fashioned look, you may choose to stack your wedding cake, setting layer directly upon the luscious layer. For that fairy tale wedding, you might set your tiers on columns for a grand pillared look. Or, you may decide on a flat cake, baked in an interesting shape or meaningful pattern.
Simple Wedding Cakes – The Decoration
Whether your dream cake is modern or traditional, ornate or simple, chances are it will feature carefully-crafted decorations. Sugarpaste is the principal medium for most wedding cake decoration, though fruit, flowers, fondant, droegnets and marzipan creations are also very popular.
The Cake Filling
The filling is the delicious froth that is spread between cake layers, literally, to fill the cake in. The filling can be anything from jam, cream, frosting, icing, chocolate, mousse, fruit, buttercream, curd, cream cheese to mascarpone, and more. It can be one flavor or a combination of flavors and filling types.
Wedding Cake Flavor
Not only should a wedding cake look amazing, but it should also taste amazing, too. Determining the flavor of your cake is yet another opportunity for you to both showcase your tastes and round off a delectable reception menu with a divine treat. The most popular wedding cake flavors are lemon, vanilla, chocolate, yellow, spice, and carrot. However, if your tastes lean toward the exotic and you have retained the services of a talented pastry chef, cake flavor options are limited only by the imagination.
H O T T I P
If you like a drier, lighter cake, ask your cake designer to use half the usual amount of sugar water in the batter.
Icing On The Cake
Icing on the cake meaning: The layer of frosting that covers the whole cake is called icing. It is the wedding cake base color, on top of which additional decoration may be layered. The most common icing types are buttercream, royal, and fondant.
Buttercream
This icing is creamy and soft and tastes the best of the three. Because of its softness, however, buttercream is not terribly versatile. Some bakers are able to smooth it over a cake in such a way that it resembles fondant, but generally, buttercream looks like what it is — frosting. There are several best buttercream frosting methods, but simply saying, Salted and organic butter is actually the best butter that you can use. It is the salt that really makes this the best buttercream frosting ever. It’s literally a myth that salted butter is an inferior quality – it’s not. It’s the same quality.
Royal Icing
For a sleeker look, royal icing is a favorite. This frosting dries hard and crunchy and is extremely durable — perfect for intricate designs, such as scrollwork, latticework, flowers, writing, etc.
Rolled Fondant
Many popular looks for today’s wedding cakes start with rolled fondant. Supremely sleek, the fondant is rolled into a sheet, wrapped over the cake and trimmed. Fondant can also be molded into shapes, most often flowers and ribbons. This icing is extremely malleable and durable, although often an acquired taste.
H O T T I P
Sugar and spice and everything nice make just about everyone’s mouth water — so keep an eye out for uninvited guests buzzing around your tasty treat. If you’re holding your reception outdoors, light a citronella candle or two to discourage yellow jackets from bugging your guests.
What Your Wedding Cake Says About You
Your wedding cake represents possibly the first shared ‘task’ of your married life – cutting it, together, sometime after the ceremony. Why not make your wedding cake personal enough to make a statement about you as a couple? There are several ways you can make your wedding cake your own.
WHAT WILL YOUR WEDDING CAKE SAY ABOUT YOU?
1. Make it yourselves rather than have it custom-made. If you like baking or ‘mucking about’ in a kitchen anyway, it’s really not as hard a job as you would imagine creating your own wedding cake from scratch. That way, you (as a couple!) get to choose the exact size, style, flavor, and colors you like.
2. If your wedding already has a particular theme, let the wedding cake carry the theme rather than choosing from among traditional wedding cakes. With advance notice, custom wedding cake makers can easily incorporate a particular theme, sometimes just by changing the color of the icing, or adding various decorative touches.
3. A seasonal wedding cake would be perfect for an off-season wedding – spring, fall and winter designs and recipes abound on the Internet, for example, or you can make up your own idea!
DISPLAYING YOUR CAKE
How you display your wedding cake is just as important as the style of cake for ‘making it yours.’ Particularly if your reception is outdoors or in a large hall, your wedding cake can easily get ‘lost in the shuffle.’
To prevent that from happening, give your wedding cake center stage. Choose a separate table to display it, and if your reception is in the evening, find a way to provide lighting for the wedding cake, to show it off.
Beside it, on the table, display symbolic personal items (photos or love letters, favorite flowers, even old concert ticket stubs), or create a collage. Anything you can think of that fits with your wedding theme, or that tell your guests a story about you as a couple will ‘personalize’ your wedding cake – and your guests will love it!