Mr. and Mrs. Adam Bedenbaugh, finally

Adam and Erin tied the knot tonight and it was so sweet. The wedding cake made it all in one piece (or, in 2 pieces, just as planned) and I love the way it turned out. Inspired by OnceWed's DIY Cake Stand, Erin chose this cake because of its rustic, homey, beautiful, messy look (just like the two of them). Seriously - everything about their wedding fit the two of them to a T. Lavender cake? yes. Creams, browns, whites, grays? yes. Mexican cokes? yes. Vinyl playing on the record player? yes.

Congratulations Mr. and Mrs. Adam Bedenbaugh!

Bedenbaugh Wedding Day

Today my friends are getting married! It has been a fun, busy, celebratory week. Last night was spent rehearsing and rehearsal dinner-ing at Rosso Trattoria, owned by the owner of Gervais & Vine. Dinner was perfect, a 3-course meal - I had an arugula salad, a filet over rosso potatoes with grilled broccolini and tiramisu for dessert; Erin had grouper over wild mushroom risotto (the risotto was seriously to die for) and creme brulee. The atmosphere was much less casual than G&V with an older Forest Acres neighborhood crowd.

So - it is 9:05 am and I am blogging when I have a wedding cake to make. I know, I know, but I need to keep my stress levels down and have fun today. So here are a few pictures from the process. My plans were to bake off all the cakes and do a "crumb ice layer" to lock in crumbs and freeze over night - today is the real day where I see what I can do. I am a lot less comfortable with the icing spatula than I used to be, so that was a little nerve-wrecking to discover, but it will be fine and hopefully look great. Stay tuned for the final product - I'll probably post tomorrow or Sunday!

our freezer, packed full of 150 lavender cupcakes

the batter is the best part


my wedding gift from Adam and Erin was this sweet apron from World Market. I am obsessed with it

wedding cake - in progress

I have been trying to make some progress on the wedding cake and cupcakes a little bit at a time - Saturday I baked off 120 of the 150 cupcakes and they are currently filling up our freezer! I still have 30 to go (plus a few more I promised to friends). Saturday I will get them out in the morning and ice them and they will be thawed by the time of the reception! Right now we are looking for little lavender stems to place on the cupcakes, but as lavender is out of season, it is proving difficult. Any pointers?

Adam picked up a cross-cut wood plaque from Michael's and built a little cake stand, inspired by OnceWed's absolutely stunning DIY cake stand - I am going to have to wait and post pictures later because I don't want to spoil the finished product (for me OR for Erin!).

As for the wedding cake, it is going to be 2-tiered and each tier will have 3 layers. I have finished baking all 3 layers of the top tier, an 8" round, and today I will bake off the 3 layers for the 10" round. I am using an amazing recipe I found on-line from "Lavender Farm." Honestly I just googled "Vanilla Lavender Cake" and looked through all the recipes I saw and picked the best one. I also googled "Lavender cupcakes" because lavender cupcakes are much more common so there are better recipes - my recipe for the cake stuck to the Lavender Farm recipe, simply to make quantity easy because it was made specifically for an 8" round. I did add in vanilla to the cupcakes which the cupcake recipe did not call for (the cake recipe did) and unlike the cake recipe, I ended up grinding the lavender florets in my blender and then added in the 3/4 c sugar and blended it with the sugar. I think it disperses the lavender really nicely because it gets blended in several times when adding it at the beginning with the sugar and butter. The recipe called for folding in the lavender with the flour - not my style.


Today: finish baking off cupcakes and cake layers.
Tomorrow: DECORATE THE WEDDING CAKE!

spring break & wedding cakes!

26 hours of driving, 3 hours with the Rhodes (1 hour holding baby Cora), 2 days with Matt, Kathryn and Andrew in Little Rock, the best Damgoode pizza I have ever had, 2 meals at Cracker Barrel, and lots of sermons, car dance parties and This American Life later, and my spring break is coming to a close. Thank you to Kathryn (read her blog here) and Matt for being the most hospitable hosts. I am so rested because of you and my notions of hospitality are so challenged.

now that spring break is almost over, it is time to get busy on the wedding cake and wedding cupcakes of these little lovebirds. great friends of mine, Erin and Adam are finally getting married in 1 week. always non-traditional, they have having a Friday evening wedding and a big blowout reception on Saturday night. for their wedding, I am making a simple, ivory, 2-tiered wedding cake (with hints of lavender) with a rustic, messy buttercream frosting and lots of fresh flowers. for the reception I will be making 150 lavender cupcakes. it is going to be a busy week (and possibly some skipped classes) but at the end of it, i get to sing for their wedding, present the wedding cake to the Bride and Groom, and watch two of my best friends blissfully make a serious covenant of love and commitment before their friends and family.

pictures to follow (give me a week).

Swan family wedding cake

Congratulations to my dear friends Wes and Linda Swan on their sweet, new marriage, and a sincere thank you for trusting me to make my very FIRST wedding cake for their wedding! Hopefully this blog will help anyone with tips on making cakes- what to do, what NOT to do!



They wanted a 3-tiered, square wedding cake and we needed about 80-100 servings. Their original ideas came from Zilly Cakes out of Buffalo, NY and we just adapted colors to their particular wedding. The result: light lavendar buttercream icing (Zilly's design was for the entire cake to be in fondant), with a mustard yellow fondant for cutting out the damask pattern, and a plum ribbon around the bottom of each tier with fresh irises laid around the cake. I decided on a 12", 9" and 6" square for each tier- the bottom tier being only 3 layers and the top 2 being 4 layers.

Flavors: a lightly-flavored lemon cake with raspberry filling. After experimenting with some great lemon cakes (my personal favorite was from this awesome recipe, and yes, I did make the entire recipe with ganache even though I just needed to try the cake!). The ultimate cake for what they wanted, though, was using Wilton's Classic White Cake recipe and simply adding in the zest of 3-6 lemons per batch. It yielded such a light tasting, aromatic lemony hint to the cake (and the cake is not too sweet- and beating the eggs and folding them in after made the cake amazingly light and fluffy).

The Swan household's favorite raspberry preserve is Whole Foods' 365 Raspberry Fruit Spread- It took 5 jars to fill the cakes. The combination of the all-natural, not-too-sweet raspberry spread and seeds with the light lemon cake was incredible!

I started baking off the layers on Monday afternoon- immediately freezing them to preserve their freshness until Friday and Saturday when I would build and decorate the cakes. Friday morning I picked up 9 lbs. of Publix buttercream icing (I don't have the capacity to make 9 lbs of icing, YET). I used Wilton's violet icing dye- so concentrated, so great! I began building by chiseling out a little pit in the inside of each layer- to keep the raspberry filling from seeping out, and piped a smal bit of icing around the outer interior of each layer before stacking.



All 3 tiers were built and trimmed by Friday night- I began icing each tier individually (well, first I iced to seal in crumbs. Thinly ice each tier, refrigerate to harden or crust, then continue icing for aesthetics) which took a painful amount of time, way longer than I expected. My tendency when icing is to keep scraping until virtually no icing is left- I kept having to go back over with tons of icing to keep a thick layer to prevent cake from showing through, or too thin icing, etc.

Saturday morning I finished icing each tier to satisfaction.

For the fondant I used Wilton's Ready-to-Use Fondant, the $20.00 bag- and used Brown and Golden Yellow dyes to work in the color. Rolled it out and cut the designs out. The design on Zilly's cake was drawn to scale by my incredible friend Katie, then re-drawn into a simpler design more appropriate for our downsized cake, and we cut each part of the design out of the fondant. The fondant lays so nicely on the buttercream icing.

We delivered the cake in 3 tiers, and stacked when we got there



At the wedding site, we finished up with a Plum (lots and lots and LOTS of Violet icing dye) "ribbon" around the bottom of each tier- because of my uneven dowel rods (so careless on my part. I hated myself) we ended up using TWO plum ribbons to hide the uneven stacking.

We finished up with the fresh irises.

In a subsequent blog I will list my tools and ingredients and credit the great stores and shops from which I found what I needed.