A very personal wedding cake

My little brother, the baby of the family, got married this past weekend.  (They grow up so fast!)

This half of PattyCake had one of the most nerve-wracking culinary experiences imaginable - I was charged with making and transporting his wedding cake from New York to Monterey, California.  And when you spend hours baking and assembling a cake for the most important day of your little brother's life, it is VERY difficult to watch the tightly packed, icepack-stuffed box of buttercreamed cakes roll down the checked luggage conveyer belt into the bowels of JFK.

Luckily, everything turned out okay - the cakes survived, including the extra sheet cakes made for the indeterminate amount of wedding guests (turned out there were about 30), and despite some last-minute nervousness and quick scrambling, the cake was still pretty.  And delicious.  And perhaps most importantly, the bride was happy.

*Chocolate cake with vanilla custard and vanilla buttercream
*Vanilla cake with raspberry mousse and vanilla buttercream

A couple of things

We graduated - yay! There are many, many things that I wanted to post here during the last weeks of school, but life got in the way.

So, as a quick catch-up, I just wanted to share some wedding cake and graduation photos. Enjoy! I'll be back with a great Linzer dough recipe that got me rave reviews when used in summertime pies.

This wedding cake, like Rebekah's earlier, was a class project done in a Marie Antoinette theme. These pictures were taken about a week after the cake had been sitting in my fridge (again, I'm going to play the 'busy life' card) so the curved bottom and top tiers look a little ... well, dumpy, here.

But you can see that the use of the gold edible paint in the beading, royal icing piping, and the furls at the top really give this cake a fun and flamboyant twist. The theme was also expounded in the chocolate cameos on each of side of the middle tier.