Nature Wedding Cake

Back to Nature Wedding Cake

So, we, Sorcha and I, were heading off to Vancouver for Cian and Lynnes Ring Ceremony, with a very basic idea for a cake in our minds.  Sure, it would be allright on the day and we would be inspired when we got there.  We slept easily on the plane over.  We had a couple of days to spare before the ceremony and there would be nothing else to do!

Yikes!  Wake up!  Lynne’s “simple” “back to nature” wedding involved making everything from scratch, foraging, borrowing, washing every plate and glass in one sink and a million other tasks I have barely wiped from my mind.  Thankfully it also involved champagne, Barry’s tea and lots of time together with her friends.  What was scraped was time in the hot tub and lazy morning sleep ins, but, well, I have to admit it, it was all FUN.

Cian’s all time favourite cake is chocolate, so that was an easy decision, no messin’ there.  Just make a recipe that has chocolate in it, on top of it and with chocolate chips too if possible.  No worries!  Sorted!

I bought two deep tins, one 10inch/25cm one 8inch/20 cm.  Then I made the same amount of mixture in each tin to make one cake flatter and one cake taller to represent the shape of two cut logs.  I used

1lb/450g butter

1lb/450g castor sugar

8 eggs

1lb/450g plain flour

4oz120g cocao powder

4oz/120g chocolate chips

and the usual method of beat the butter with the sugar, add the eggs and some of the flour, fold in the rest of the flour and the chocolate chips.  For more detailed information, google “madeira cake”.

I made two types of butter cream, one large amount of chocolate butter cream and one smaller amount of white chocolate butter cream.  Both butter creams had melted chocolate of the correct colour added in.  This helped stabalise it and made it easier to mold to the correct shape. I used dowels to stop one cake collapsing into the other and balanced the top cake at the back of the bottom one.  I piped melted chocolate to represent the rings of the tree and Sorcha  added the decorations of blueberries, blackberries and mint leaves, having much more patience than me with the final decorating details.

We were rather pleased with ourself, but the stunning display cake stand that Brad Siebler made was so amazing and set it off so well, that it was, well, “the icing on the cake!”

Oh!  A great deal of help came from Sorcha, especially the decorating. In fact, that is her hand getting the bark effect on the icing.  She has endless patience for the finer details.  X