This week marks two very exciting events in my wedding cake making journey. I'm finally meeting with two of my lovely brides (and one equally lovely groom) for their consultations and tasting sessions. My one and only (glorious!) experience of a wedding cake tasting session was last year when I went with my best friend Charlotte and her then fiance to try out different flavour options for their cake. Sounds weird, but as the cake was a gift from my parents I had the perfect excuse to tag along and find out more about the process. The whole thing was actually really nicely done. We sat in comfy chairs with cups of tea and coffee and basically ate a plateful of cake, trying the same flavours over and over again 'just to be sure'. In the end I think Charlotte and I made more decisions about what she would have than Tom did!
If you are planning your wedding at the moment and haven't yet had a cake tasting I would highly recommend you do so- whoever you choose to make your cake should offer this service and ideally free of charge. Let's be honest here, wedding cakes can be incredibly expensive things. If you are spending potentially several hundred pounds on a cake you deserve to know for certain that it is going to be delicious and enjoyable for you and your guests, otherwise you might as well just get a Colin the caterpillar cake from M&S (which I personally think would be an AMAZING idea- why has nobody done this!?). Its also useful because everyone's recipe is inevitably slightly different and there's no guarantee that your interpretation of a victoria sandwich is the same as your cake maker's. I offer a list of eight flavours/ flavour combinations for my customers to choose from which are tried and tested and which I am confident making. I email them the list and then invite them to choose as many or as few as they would like to try. Its important to remember that your wedding cake doesn't have to be just one flavour, especially if it has more than one tier, and its actually quite nice to go for a few different flavours. That way you're more likely to cater to the tastes of a wider range of your guests as everyone has different preferences. My brother in law for example will only eat cake if it is chocolate or pistachio whilst his wife, my sister, loves lemon and raspberry. To avoid a premature divorce they opted for a combination of all of the above and everyone was happy (except Pete who actually didn't get any of the pistachio layer because the servers at the venue ATE IT!).
I realised this week that, between them, my brides have pretty much opted to try every single flavour I offer. My initial thought was 'wow that's amazing, they must really like the sound of what I have to offer'. My second and slightly more rational thought was something along the lines of, 'Holy crap, how the hell am I going to make eight different cakes, each with different fillings, syrups and buttercreams, in A WEEK and keep them fresh between tastings!?'. If nothing else I don't actually own enough cake tins to do that haha! Cue multiple hours of online research, youtube tutorials and coffee which (thank goodness) finally resulted in a solution that now seems so simple and glaringly obvious that I wonder why it didn't occur to me before. Let me introduce you to your wedding cake making/ tasting/ generally amazing new best friend: the freezer. Yep, thats right. The freezer. To me, the idea of cake in the freezer always seemed like a bad idea. I had visions of thawing cakes going all watery and weird and seeing as I would never, ever store a cake in even a humble fridge for more than about twenty minutes (guarantee if you do your cake will be DRY as the Sahara), the freezer seemed like an even worse idea. But, having done a bit of practise I've come to realise that not only is it a brilliant idea, its actually the only feasible way of being able to produce cake samples of my entire repertoire at short notice.
The process is exactly the same as normal in that I made all the cakes and fillings and layered them up. I let them set, crumb coated and once again let them chill. Once they were set I clingfilmed the absolute life out of them (about 3 layers) and whacked them in the freezer! That way, when I need them for a tasting all I have to do is get them out, cut off a neat slice (whilst still frozen) and then let them come to room temperature before serving. Genius! I just know I'm going to feel so fancy and professional serving tea to my brides whilst they munch on neat squares of delicious cake wondering how on earth I made so many teeny tiny cakes in one go. They need never know!
I've been reading that lots of people use this process for the actual wedding cake itself and that its much easier to neatly ice a frozen tier than a fresh one. Let me know in the comments below if you've used this method or if you have any tips/ tricks. I'll let you know how they go- fingers crossed!
Have a great week,
Ruth x