My brother has asked my girlfriend and I if we’d like to bake him some cakes for his wedding this September. Now we haven’t had all that much experience of baking but we do really enjoy it.
It’s not a huge wedding - there’s going to be about 70 - 80 people there. As we’ve never baked a wedding cake we thought it might be best to do a whole load of cupcakes and present them nicely. I was wondering if anyone had any tips on what they could look like or how they could be presented that they could share with us.
Hiya!
I’m not a cake decorator but I do bake for a number of tearoom in my area.
I find cake magazines really helpful because they take you through step by step and list the items you will actually need rather than make the mistake…like I’ve done many times!! Of buying everything you think you may need and end up not using.
I’ll pop back with the links for the best ones once I find them
Also pinterest I find helpful just to see what other people non professional have put their mind too and completed with success.
If your making cupcakes you could make these well in advance and freeze, un-iced.
Here’s a few of mine that I attempted,hope you don’t mind but thought I’d show you how useful following the step by step tutorials are, as Id never attempted anything before along the cake decorating thing!
Sorry pics weren’t showing!
Here’s another link for my FB page…trying again!
Yes Pinterest is brilliant for finding inspiration with recipes and baking. There are some amazing cake designs. I’ve seen the cupcake style too with a tiered effect.
Blimey thanks everyone, a lot of good suggestions here. I’ll go through them properly tonight and report back.
funnily enough my girlfriend is really keen on doing a ferris wheel display although I reckon they tend to only hold a handful of cakes. Maybe we could do that as a centrepiece and the group the rest of them on stands around it.
I don’t bake but I made a successful(in taste, not look) cake the other week.
I was going to suggest Pinterest for ideas, I love the idea of coloured sponge, so you cut into it and it reveals rainbow layers.
@stephshortstationery I didn’t realise you could freeze cupcakes. That could be an ideal solution as I was quite worried about transporting them on the 4 hour trip to the Gower in Wales where the wedding will take place. Icing them a couple of days before hand when we arrive sounds like a much easier job that baking and then icing. Thank you also for posting the tutorials. I’ll definitely be taking a look.
@SashaGarrett Those cake stands do actually look very good. I really like the grey one. If it holds up to 105 cakes that should be more than enough. We could then get a big wheel stand to go next to it.
I also really like the idea of having the massive cupcake on top. I’ve seen those moulds in the shops before and I’ve always thought “What’s the point of that” but seeing it on there it actually looks really good.
I love baking pintrest is your friend for this some very beautiful ideas. Some of the ‘pins’ are a bit over the top so pick one you know you can nail as if you pick a really difficult one it will only lead to added stress. (I tryed something once that I’m sure a very artistic person could just about do which I’m not and was upset with the result)
For anyone that is interested in how this all turned out in the end I have a couple of pictures for you.
We decided not to make cupcakes as it turned out that there were already a couple of people that were going to do that and we wanted to try something a little different. We came up with the idea to make soft, chewy gingerbread, one of our favourite things.
We also (very wrongly) thought that these would be easier to make than cupcakes!
So we chose to make the gingerbread in the shapes of my brother and his bride’s favourite hobbies - cycling, reading and dancing, we also decided to throw in some heart shapes to signify how very much in love they were! I found some suitable cookie cutters online and found a recipe.
It was fairly simple to make the dough but an absolute nightmare to cut the shapes out as they were very intricate and included embossed details that absolutely refused to fall easily out of the cutters. I eventually came up with a method that got the job done which involved heavily flouring the cutters and rolling and cutting the shapes out directly on the baking parchment and then transferring to the baking tray for cooking. It was virtually impossible to cut the shapes out and then lift them onto the baking paper without warping the shapes completely.
We decided to ice our gingerbread with sugar paste and used edible pens for the finer details like the bicycle spokes and writing in the books. The letters on the hearts are made from royal icing and there is a bit of edible shimmer thrown in for good measure.
All in all we were very pleased with how they turned out and they went down a storm at the wedding. Especially with the younger children that were there. Every single one was eaten and we got a number of nice comments too.
