Some of you might remember (if you don’t, go ahead and read Part 1 and Part 2—we’ll wait for you) that on Saturday afternoon, when the first batch of frosting went down the drain and I had my tantrum, I mentioned that the wedding was 27 hours away. You might have then figured, correctly, that the ceremony was to take place at 5:30 P.M. In which case, you are probably going to wonder, “Why are they up at the crack of dawn to frost the cake if they had all day to do it?” I can only answer that making a good wedding cake is a complicated and time-consuming task. I knew that, researched it, prepared for it, and still the sheer number of details and the amount of time they took surprised me.

Saturday night, we put the cakes in the fridge with the crumb coat of frosting on, so they could chill while we slept. About four hours later, Troy (who is my hero, for his help with this cake and a thousand other reasons) got up to take the buttercream out of the fridge so it could soften. He went back to bed after resetting the alarm, and an hour later we both got up and headed to the kitchen. We frosted all four of the tiers (three chocolate, one white) till they were buttercreamily perfect and carefully put all the cakes back in the fridge so the frosting could chill and firm up before the next step. While that was going on, since it was Sunday morning, we showered and dressed and went to church with Annalie and my parents. After worship, we skipped Bible study and went back home so we could get the cakes ready for transport.

In the cookbook I used as a wedding-cake reference, the author suggests completely assembling a stacked cake before very carefully loading it into the padded cargo bay of a van or station wagon, putting a sign in the window that reads, “Caution! Wedding cake on board!” putting on your emergency flashers and then driving to the reception site at about 10mph, avoiding freeways and busy intersections. I mention this here because it gave us a good laugh, and I wanted to share the mirth. Since we knew we had access to the reception hall most of the day, including an industrial fridge, it was simpler for us to just take the frosted tiers and supplies to the park and assemble it there.

You might have noticed in the photos that all the cakes were placed onto cardboard rounds after they came out of the oven. The cardboard under each tier was a little bit wider than the cake itself, which was about to come in handy. And I know you remember the pizza boxes, because I keep mentioning them. Those pizza boxes made getting the frosted tiers to the park a snap. Because the cardboard was wider than the cake, we just set each tier in its own box. If the cakes did slide about a bit during the drive, the cardboard would hit the side of the box and prevent the cake from moving further. Also, apparently, cardboard doesn’t slide around much on more cardboard. Once Troy got everything arranged in the back of the van, those suckers were secure. So we drove (slowly, carefully) the five minutes to the park and arrived with all four of the tiers intact.

When we arrived, Erin, Rocco, and many of their friends and family were busily working in the kitchen, outside setting the tables, or hanging decorations from the trees. There weren’t many people paid to help with this wedding. Almost everything was done by Erin or Rocco themselves, or someone who loves them: arranging flowers for bouquets and centerpieces, appetizers, decorations, place settings, music, making and serving the cake, and even marrying the bride and groom (Rocco’s dad is a retired municipal judge). It made the whole wedding much more memorable and special to me and Troy, because we were directly responsible for part of the celebration. Imagine how much more memorable it made the whole thing for Erin & Rocco. It made me wonder why more people don’t do weddings that way.

[If you aren't interested in the details of assembly, feel free to skip ahead to the pretty pictures.] Making a stacked wedding cake involves a bit of engineering. First, I smeared some frosting on the cake platter to prevent the cake from sliding around, and centered the bottom tier on it. Next, Troy said, “Here, give me those,” and took the dowels and knife from me, because he is awesome and he knew this was the part of the whole operation I was least confident about. So I mostly stood around and watched while he stuck a dowel in the cake and marked it with a pen a quarter-inch above the top of the cake, and then took the dowel out and used a knife to cut the dowel at the mark. He used that as a template to cut four more lengths of dowel, which we placed around the cake in a circle midway between the center and the edge. We did the same thing for the middle tier. Then, we carefully picked up the middle tier, cardboard and all, and set it on top of the dowels in the bottom tier. Next, the top tier was placed on the dowels in the middle tier. A little tweaking to make sure they were centered, and then Troy used the knife to sharpen one end of a long dowel, which we inserted through the top tier and pushed all the way through the layers of cake and cardboard to the bottom, and left it sticking up out of the top. It would help stabilize the cake when we needed to move it back to the fridge.

Now, a wedding cake with cardboard sticking out from under each tier isn’t very pretty. So I added enough frosting around the base of each tier to cover the cardboard. Then I did some touch-ups to the rest of the frosting, adding a bit here, smoothing it out there, till it looked right. I wasn’t going for a perfectly smooth surface; I wanted the cake to look like it was meant to be eaten. Also, I don’t have the skillz or the patience to get that faux fondant look. That done, we cleaned up, put the cake in the fridge to chill, and went home to take a much-deserved nap. Whew.

It almost feels anticlimactic to write any more. After all, most of our work was done. Over the course of three days, we had mixed, baked, iced, transported, and assembled into a sturdy stack enough cake to feed over a hundred people. But we had a little bit left to do before the wedding. We had to make the cakes pretty.

After we napped and showered, we got ourselves and Annalie dressed in our party clothes, and headed to the park with my parents, who were also invited to the wedding. When we got there, we moved the cake from the fridge to the cake table and removed the long dowel. Then Troy, secure in the knowledge that he had done more than anyone asked and therefore had my undying thanks, wandered off with Annalie to inspect the playground.

I gathered the flowers that had been set aside to use as decoration on the cake and cake table, and begged some folks who were hanging around, helping with last-minute details (Thank you Kelly, Kelly, Courtney, and anyone else I’m forgetting!) to come give me advice and feedback. So together we arranged the cake topper and the gerbera daisies on the two cakes. Erin had also asked me to decorate the cake tables, and I don’t have a clear memory of how that was accomplished, so I am pretty sure I had nothing to do with how lovely they looked in the end. Thank you, whomever decorated the cake tables! They looked great!

You’ve probably had the experience of going to a wedding, oohing and ahhing over a truly gorgeous cake, and then eating your first bite and being totally underwhelmed. I know I have. I knew that would not happen at Erin & Rocco’s wedding, and they knew it too. I’m not bragging; I simply would not have offered to make a wedding cake if I weren’t confident of my ability to make a delicious cake. Erin has eaten my baking many times over the years, and she trusted I could do it too. Even so, the best part of the whole experience, by far, was when Erin and Rocco cut the cake, fed each other a bite, and Erin turned around and exclaimed, “Oh my God, Bethany, this cake is SO good!” That one moment of knowing I had made someone I love happy on her wedding day made every moment of stress totally worth it.

Thanks for letting me play such a big part in your wedding day, Erin & Rocco! I appreciate your faith in me more than I can tell you. When you need me to make a cake for the next big party, just let me know.

To see more photos, go to Erin & Rocco’s wedding cake - a photoset on Flickr

In case you missed it: Part 1.

Things had gone really well on Friday with mixing and baking the vast quantities of cake required to serve 100-120 people. We were still flushed with triumph from hacking the pizza-box solution to transporting the baked layers. So we greeted Saturday’s tasks with confidence: torting the layers, dabbing with moistening syrup, making the frosting, filling the layers, assembling the tiers, frosting with a crumb coat and a final coat. Easy, right?

Hahahahaha! Ahem. Pardon me.

Things started out well enough. I made the moistening syrup that morning, which wasn’t much more complicated than boiling water. The next task was to tort the layers—to slice each one in half horizontally. (This adds height to the finished cake, because instead of one layer of filling per tier you get three.) With the smaller cakes, this wasn’t too much of a challenge. But after looking through my parents’ kitchen while the syrup was bubbling away, I realized there wasn’t a knife in the house that would work well for slicing the 14-inch cakes. That seemed like a simple-enough fix, though. I headed to the store to look for a long, thin knife.

Two hours and four stores later, I was exhausted and had learned that you can’t buy a decent knife longer than eight inches for less than $50. I could have bought the 18-inch cake leveler that Wilton makes, but it cost $30, which seemed expensive at the beginning of my shopping trip. In the end, I decided to buy the 10-inch cake leveler for three bucks and a seven-inch knife and depend on Troy to help me out.

So by the time I got home, I was already a bit frazzled. But still upbeat! The frosting would be great! The recipe was easy enough and sounded positively decadent: melt 30 ounces of good-quality bittersweet chocolate, cool slightly, and combine with 3 cups of room-temperature, full-fat sour cream. How could it go wrong?

Oh, it could go very wrong. I had taken the sour cream out of the fridge an hour before I planned to make the frosting, as instructed by the recipe, and then waited another half-hour for good measure. When I added it to the chocolate, was cold enough that it caused the chocolate to clump up into little bits. Having had some experience working with melted chocolate, I still didn’t panic. I attempted to fix it by microwaving the whole mess on very low power and then stirring, but it just got slimy. I mucked with it for ten or fifteen minutes before dumping it down the drain.

Then, I had a small tantrum. WHY WAS THIS HAPPENING TO ME, GOD? WHY WHY WHY? THE WEDDING IS IN 27 HOURS AND I NEED THIS TO WORK! AAAAUUUGH! Troy remained calm, gave me a hug, and said he would try making the next batch for me. (Did I mention that I had to make this quantity five times over to fill and frost the entire cake? Or that my husband is very nearly perfect?)

This time we dumped the sour cream out on a plate and left it out till it felt room-temperature to the touch. It worked! Even so, the chocolate-sour cream mixture was very thick and tended to get thicker the more it was stirred. And, while delicious, it was almost overwhelmingly rich—I couldn’t imagine a whole cake covered in it. So I decided to use it as a filling and make a chocolate buttercream for the frosting. I’d had the foresight to borrow my cousin’s Kitchen-Aid stand mixer, and I was making vanilla buttercream for the white cake anyway, so making this last-minute change actually made my life easier.

Troy, having made one batch of the frosting-turned filling for me, offered to tort the cakes. I gratefully accepted his offer of help, and made the rest of the filling while he made torted the 6- and 10-inch layers with the cake leveler. Then he efficiently sliced the chocolate 14-inch layers while I rotated them as he cut and marveled at the fact that he was doing in five minutes what would have taken me an hour.

Dabbing the moistening syrup on each of the now-torted layers didn’t take long. Next I attempted to quickly get the filling spread before it stiffened up too much. It was tricky to work with, but I managed. Troy helped me assemble each tier, and we only had one minor disaster with the 14-inch tier because of a silly mistake I made. We ended up using a knife to trim off the crumbled edge, so that if anyone had taken a ruler to that tier it would have measured about 13.25 inches. Oh well. At this point we had a time-is-short-do-whatever-works mentality settling in. We ended up not torting or using moistening syrup on the white cake at all, just to save time. If I had to do it again, though, I wouldn’t skip those steps because I could totally tell the difference when I tried both cakes at the reception.

After a quick trip to the nearest grocery store for more ingredients, I made the vanilla and chocolate buttercreams as quickly as I could, because it was getting late. I filled the white cake, assembled it, and did the crumb coat (a thin coat of frosting that seals in the crumbs and makes a smooth surface for the final, pretty coat of frosting) before putting it in the fridge. The three chocolate tiers were already assembled, so I just had to frost them with the crumb coat while Troy moved things around in my parents’ refrigerator to find spots to put them all.

We put the rest of the buttercream in the fridge to await the final coat of frosting, cleaned up the kitchen quickly, and went to bed to get some much-deserved sleep.

I thought I was going to be able to fit the whole story into two parts, but I’m not. So stay tuned for Part 3, and find out if we made up a big hill to the wedding/reception site without anything horrible happening to the cakes!

When my dear friend Erin got engaged, I offered to make the wedding cake as a gift to her and Rocco. I’d never made a wedding cake before, but had plenty of baking experience. It sounded like fun! I’d always wanted to try making a wedding cake! Also, the wedding was over a year away at the time!

Over the coming months, Erin and I emailed back and forth about cake flavors (chocolate) and frosting options (more chocolate) and decorating styles. I researched how to make a three-tier stacked cake and compared recipes online. I remained confident and excited right up till two weeks before the wedding. That’s when I started worrying that doing a stacked cake for 100ish people would be more than I could handle. I was also stressed due to the difficulty I’d had finding a red dress for the wedding. (Did I mention I was also one of Erin’s attendants?) I’m not a naturally pessimistic person, though, so I shrugged it off, armed myself with cookbook and shopping list, and headed to Omaha.

Finding a great red dress on my first shopping day in Omaha perked me up considerably. So by the time I had gathered pans and shopped for ingredients, I was feeling confident again. Until everything nearly came to a screeching halt three days before the wedding because I could not find the key ingredient: Dutch process cocoa. I know it used to be common in grocery stores. I don’t know why it’s not anymore. I tried seven or eight stores before I finally found it at Penzeys. Crisis narrowly averted!

Since I was doing all this cake-making in Omaha, my cousin Tressa graciously allowed me to use her kitchen for the mixing and baking. Her kitchen was remodeled a couple of years ago, and boasts two ovens, plenty of counter space, and the all-important Kitchen-Aid stand mixer. My mom happened to be there too, watching Tressa’s kids all day, so Annalie had plenty of playmates to distract her while Troy and I worked. Two of the older kids helped me make pan liners by tracing circles onto parchment paper and cutting them out. It took about seven hours, start to finish, to mix, bake, cool, and wrap all eight layers for the three-tier chocolate cake and the two-layer white cake. Troy kept things running smoothly by washing bowls and pans and doing the heavy lifting (those 14″ pans are not light when they’re full of batter).

When we started baking, we still weren’t exactly sure how we were going to transport the wrapped layers back to my parents’ house, where we would store them till we were ready for the next step. As it turned out, we had pizza for lunch that day, and inspiration struck: why not use clean pizza boxes? Troy called Pizza Hut to ask about buying some, but when he explained they would be used for a wedding cake, they gave us the eight boxes we needed for free. Score! And they worked perfectly.

So. I found a red dress. The cake layers were baked, wrapped, and transported safely. Sour cream and Ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate were waiting patiently to be turned into deep, dark, delicious frosting. So far, so good.

In Part 2: The first batch of frosting is a disaster! An eleventh-hour substitution must be made! The cake…gets stacked! Dunh dunh duuunh!…

To see more photos, go to Erin & Rocco’s wedding cake - a photoset on Flickr