When my Mum & I were asked to do a Superhero wedding cake, we were quite excited, and, in all honesty, when we found out the specifications, we were a little concerned: the bride seemed to what so many different
and contrasting elements:
- the
cake topper were to be based on this cartoon:
- Robin
from this cartoon to be sat further down the cake:
- the
cake was to be red
- the
flowers were to be baby blue and based on the small roses in the brides bouquet
At first we couldn’t get our
heads round how it was going to look. I think mostly because it was unlike
anything we’d been asked to do before.
But then, when we started putting
the cake together we quickly found out that the bride and groom knew exactly
what they were doing, and had visualized something quirky, personal, and
unconventionally elegant.
My mum was put in charge of
cakes, covering, and flowers. (She may have drawn the short straw!) The tiers
were three different flavours: fruit, chocolate and sponge. And square. That’s
not our best shape cake. As we needed red to cover the cake, we went for Renshaw's pre-coloured fondant. At £2 per 250g, it’s more expensive than colouring the
icing yourself, but we knew we were going to need a fair amount and wanted to
make sure the colour was consistent. Conveniently, Hobbycraft sent out a
25% discount voucher just as we were planning on stocking up!
The flowers were made using a
pale blue flower paste. I love working with this flower paste. It can get
sticky but stretches to get beautifully thin and dries quickly, maintaining its
shape. We made a lot more flowers than we needed because we weren't sure how many we'd need. In the end we went for a couple on each corner: this meant that it didn't take away from the characters.
We probably would have used a mix
of flower paste and fondant to make the figures but before we started we came
across Squire’s sugar dough and decided to give this a go.
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| http://www.squires-shop.com/uk/product/sk-sugar-dough-white-200g |
It costs £4.35 for 200g and we used
400g. Similar to the flower paste, it get quite sticky if you have warm hands but
it was nice to work with. It was easy to mould, set quickly but unlike flower
paste, if you decided you needed to re-mould something, and hadn't left it too
long, you could do so without it going crumbly and full of bits. I would definitely use this again but probably only for a special occasion; for every day use, fondant is more than good enough.
Batman was the easiest to model.
He was mostly column-like, with a nice cape to help keep him up right on the
cake.
Wonder Woman, on the other hand,
was a pain. She was bending from the waist to kiss Batman and this made it very
difficult to keep her upright! In the end we had to package her up separately
and have her put on the cake at the venue; we couldn't risk her falling off in
transit!
And there was also little Robin, who was just minding his own business sat on the edge of the cake. He was fun to do - he had lots of the little details that help figures come to life.
So here is the finished thing! It was a lot of hard work and a bit of stress right at the end trying to put everything together but I enjoyed watching it come together, and, most importantly of all, the bride and groom loved it! :)
Vicky xx
