Hello again! Today we're going to talk wedding cake... This is what has been taking up most of my time lately but all of my practices are done and I am as ready as I can be for my final cake in two weeks time! Eeek!
So, as I have mentioned before, the cake is a four tiered cake made up of an 8 inch mocha mud cake, a 10 inch chocolate mud cake, a 12 inch caramel mud cake and a 14 inch raspberry mudcake (that's a lot of mud!!). The chocolate based mudcake recipes were adapted from here. The icing is a Swiss buttercream which I have read is the most stable (along with Italian buttercream) of all the buttercreams. This is due to the increased fat content of other buttercreams (i. e. French buttercream which uses only egg yolks and German buttercream white uses the whole egg), Swiss buttercream only uses egg whites. The original plan was to use French buttercream but I decided that it would be best to use the Swiss buttercream due to the extra stability- we don't want four tiers of cake covered in slop now do we? Swiss buttercream uses a lot of egg whites and I was sick of trying to find uses for all those poor egg yolks (you can only make so much custard) so I decided to go ahead and try out cartoned egg whites that you find in the fridge section next to the buttermilk- they worked a treat and saved me from wasting all those egg yolks! I will be trying them out on macarons next and will report back with my findings. I know in a professional kitchen egg yolks are usually the desirable parts but in a home kitchen, it's definitely all about the egg whites (especially if you are playing around with macarons).
So over the past few months, I have basically found any reason I can to bake cake. I have rostered myself on to morning tea so many times, baked cakes for Christmas, my partner's boss' farewell and for our whole of HPS morning tea as well as random morning teas whenever I feel like it. Needless to say, my partner's and my own workmates have been very happy with random cakes rocking up every now and then.
One thing that I had major problems with was the decoration around the edges. First I tried chocolate which was an epic fail and looked absolutely terrible thus I took no photos of THAT cake. Second, I tried modelling chocolate which, for some reason, became very sticky and leached out oil while trying to work with it which made it near impossible to do anything with let alone get nice neat lines. Third was modelling chocolate with icing sugar added, this worked quite well and got around the oiliness. Fourth was chocolate marshmallow fondant which just turned out the wrong colour and no amount of chocolate would get it to the lovely milk chocolate colour I desired. Lastly I tried plain chocolate fondant which was quite hard to handle and melted very quickly whilst trying to place it. I am planning on using just modelling chocolate as I have now bought an extruder which allows the chocolate to be pushed out in a uniform shape that I can refrigerate and then have a lot more control over the strands during placing.
Luckily the only cake that I had to practice twice was the mocha cake (the smallest one) as the first time I made it, it did not have enough coffee so I had to amp it up a bit. Not sure if I have mentioned yet but the mudcake recipe that I am using is amazing and the resulting cake has a great texture with a really fine crumb. I love cutting this cake open as it just looks beautiful inside.
First mocha mudcake trial (plus a note from Mr T trying to get people to eat it)- I love how it looks cut open especially with the white icing.
Second mocha mudcake trial (note the thick lines of modelling chocolate around the edges- less than desirable)
The chocolate mud cake, I made for our Christmas party and it went down really well. As you can see, the icing on top of this cake is not very smooth or awesome. Mr T bought me a Baker's blade for Christmas which is amazingly helpful to get that nice smooth look on the top and sides of your buttercream iced cakes (definitely a must have if you intend to decorate with buttercream).
10 inch chocolate mudcake.
The caramel mudcake used a different recipe which I will post later. It was a big hit with my workmates as it was not too sweet, the whole 12 inch cake went during one day! As you can see the chocolate around the edges is still quite thick. There is also not very much decoration as at this stage I was just using modelling chocolate and rolling it by hand which I very quickly became annoyed with.
12 inch caramel mudcake.
The last cake is the chocolate raspberry mudcake (which I only put half of the baking soda in for-oops!). The flavour was good and everyone thought there was enough raspberry flavour in it. The decoration on the sides of this cake was plain chocolate fondant. As you can see, it is quite wiggly in places as it was just melting as I was trying to place it. But the decorations were made with the extruder and are the right thickness for the final run. As you can see from the pictures, the modelling chocolate decorations are definitely the most stable.
Top view of the 14 inch chocolate raspberry mudcake (design was Mr T's idea).
Side view of the 14 inch chocolate raspberry mudcake with its squiggly lines.
A couple of things I must mention about making these cakes is that once you get to the 12 inch cake, life becomes waaay harder and mixing the batter is very difficult as it's hard to find a bowl that will fit that much batter in. The other thing is that they are HEAVY, the biggest one was about 8 kilos on it's own, very hard to carry places. I think I will be assembling the cake at the venue for this wedding.
Finally some food for thought.... The shopping list!!
| Butter | 8228 | g |
| Sugar | 4213 | g |
| Cocoa | 490 | g |
| Dark chocolate | 2400 | g |
| White chocolate | 2100 | g |
| Plain flour | 4325 | g |
| Self raising flour | 825 | g |
| Eggs | 12 | |
| Vanilla essence | 1 bottle | |
| Brown sugar | 1100 | g |
| Egg white | 1133 | g |
| Milk choc | 1000 | g |
| Glucose syrup | 2 jars | |
| Raspberries | 1500 | g |
Now THAT is a lot of butter!
Sorry for the poor quality photos- they are just mobile photos.
Stay tuned for more of the wedding cake saga and the final wedding cake!
Have you ever attempted a huge baking project? What was it?
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