Well, I'm back and the wedding is all over. It turned out to be a lovely day and pretty much everyone had a good time. Being maid of honour and head baker for the cake was hectic to say the least. But, I had some helpers to make the cake and it all turned out very well. I really appreciated all the extra help we got from others who could spare the time.
I flew from Canberra to Adelaide for the wedding and I had to bring the cake topper with me. So I carried it with me in a container. I also had 9 Kilos of butter that I had purchased from Cost co in my back pack (I bought the butter at Cost co because it was cheaper to get it there than to purchase such huge amounts whilst in Adelaide). It was hard to pick everything up and and to put it all down again so of course, I had to be explosives tested in the airport right after I came through the metal detectors and had just put my bags back on. I went through the metal detector and they scanned my bags (and the cake topper) the guys made the conveyer belt go very slowly so that it would not hurt the topper. Then I got asked all the questions "are you getting married?", " who is this for?", "did you make that?", "how did you make that?" etc. The only question I didn't get asked was the only one I was expecting "what are those 6 large blocks of stuff in your back pack?". I guess they can tell butter from bricks of drugs or explosives pretty easily. The cake topper was a big conversation starter and most people I came into contact with in the airport and on the plane asked me about it so much so that the lady next to me on the plane and I ended up talking cakes and weddings all the way to Adelaide. Fun times.
So, it took about 5 days to go from a pile of ingredients to a massive, four tiered wedding cake.
Our giant pile of ingredients
To begin we had to melt all of the chocolate, butter, sugar and water together so that we could let it cool. The first step was to weigh out all of the ingredients (straight into the giant saucepans we were using). Thanks to Dr L's mum who bought her a pretty good scale for her wedding (something that I could never go without nowdays- weighing is so much easier than having to measure with cups) we had the best tools to work with.
Ingredients all weighed out.
Chocolate mixture melted.
Caramel mixture melted.
Next was the chore of mixing the dry ingredients into the melted chocolate mixture. Needless to say it was quite difficult to mix over a kilo of flour into a thick chocolate mixture, but we did it!
Mixing the flour into the caramel batter (a very good arm work out!)
Next was to get the batter into the pans that had been lined with baking paper. Because the saucepans, once full were so heavy and I'm pretty short, I could not lift it high enough to pour the batter while it was on the bench so it had to put the pans on the floor and pour the batter in that way.
Pouring the batter into the pans.
Next, it was time to cook the cakes. Luckily enough, Dr L has a really, really wide oven and we were able to bake two at once.
Baking the cakes (how wide is this crazy oven).
We cooked the smaller cakes on one day and left the biggest cake for the next day as during my practices, I had found that this cake took about 6 hours to cook. In the morning I mixed all the ingredients together and put it in the oven then I left to do other things while Dr L babysat the cake. About halfway through cooking there was a CAKESPLOSION and choc raspberry cake went everywhere in the oven. I guess we had overfilled the pan although, when I trialled it previously it had been fine with that amount of batter (maybe Dr L has more potent bicarb soda :P).
CAKESPLOSION!!
One change I made to the recipes was that when Dr L asked the Grinch to buy some coffee for the mocha mud cake, he didn't realise it was for the cake and bought caramel flavoured coffee. It was a good mix up as it turned out to be such a delicious cake, I would definitely make it again. As I have mentioned before, the recipe for the chocolate mudcakes was from here. The normal chocolate mudcake omitted the raspberries and the caramel mocha mudcake had a small jar of caramel Moccona coffee added to it (gosh it was sooo gooood).
Caramel mocha and chocolate mudcakes.
Once the cakes were made, It was time to ice them, I will write about the icing and assembly in my next post as this post is already getting quite lengthy. Stay tuned for the grand finale of the wedding cake saga.
Do you have any fun airport stories?
