What A Life!

This cake was designed as a 75th birthday cake for a very accomplished gentleman.

Business man, musician, author, sportsman, Sicilian, opera lover, teacher and so much more, this cake celebrates the life of a great man.

The cake looks fairly small here doesn't it?  In real life, it was HUGE.

Persian Wedding - St Lawrence Hall, Toronto

Following from our recent post all about the making of this cake, here is the finished cake set up at St Lawrence Hall.

This was one of the occasions when I not only got to make the cake, but also attend the wedding.  And what a wedding it was!  For anyone who has never attended a Persian wedding, you should really put it on your bucket list, my husband and I would certainly do it again in a heartbeat.  If you've gone to one of those weddings with music blasting and no one on the dance floor, then this would be a refreshing change for you!  Everyone (and I mean everyone) dances at a Persian wedding.  It starts before dinner when the emcee invites all the guests out to talk anyone who is in any doubt about the protocol, how it's done.  "Hands in the air for the men, turn them from side to side" then he explains "For the ladies, hands in the air but turn the wrists around and under from time to time".  Then the music, they make it so that no one can sit still!  Anyway, I'll try and post a video at some point to share the experience with you.

The ceremony is very special and there are lots of rituals and presented items that are representative of important things in the couple's life.  We were asked to make cookies for the presentation table which we were of course also delighted to do.  These fuchsia coloured cookies had a gold rose in the middle of each one.

(Better pictures to follow)

Topsy Turvy in Pink

This is right out of our usual realm of victorian/english garden style cakes.  Just once in a while it's nice to be able to make something that pushes me to create something totally different.  A change is as good as a rest, they say and in this case it was very true.  Lots of fun to create a cake that was not traditionally our forte.

This is a dummy (fake/faux) cake and can be seen in our showroom.

Beach Wedding - Hamilton Waterfront

For this young couple a beach wedding was organized and they chose sand and shells with pearls and water droplets for their cake and they asked for one or two blue shells on the cake.

The two interlocking starfish are very a propo for a cake topper and all the shells, sand, pearls and 'water' are completely edible.

Persian Gold - St Lawrence Hall, Toronto

When this wonderful couple asked me to make their wedding cake I was quite delighted, however, when I heard their ideas my heart sank, "Topsy turvy" they said "with a pillow and a cup with coffee coming out and all tilted and looking like it's falling down".  But they wanted a serious side to their cake since their venue dictated some kind of antique feel with lots of gold and engravings, high ceilings and chandeliers.Up for a challenge and totally out of my comfort zone I agreed to work in styrofoam for the topsy turvy part of the cake and real cake for the more serious base of the cake.

Starting weeks ago with the construction was fun, how to place the pieces so that they looked like they were falling, without having them actually fall.  Then came the task of covering them so that they would look good at all angles, these cakes show their bottoms (so to speak) when usually cakes are not decorated underneath these are.

We began setting up the pieces in the general formation that they would appear in taking pictures as we went so that we wouldn't forget how to put it all back together again once it was taken apart.  Then came the job of applying the fondant and allowing it to dry thoroughly before reassembling the cake (to avoid all the fingermarks and dents that we could have created when trying to manipulate this if the cake had been real.

Next came the task of starting to antique the cake so that it would look like it was made 100's of years ago and was just sitting there waiting to be eaten (sounds like a Dickens novel doesn't it?)  Now that the pieces were in place it was easy to pick out the parts that needed darkening and highlighting, the final cake started to take shape.  Gold balls were added, but not bold bright ones, we found gold balls that looked slightly tarnished.