slocakes

ELSBERND WEDDING May 3, 2008

This is the wedding cake that Blake and I made for our dear old friend, Matte Elsbernd, and his lovely bride, Nicole, on May 3, 2008. Their wedding reception was held at the Fleur De Lys in San Francisco, CA.

DesignThe Bride picked out a picture of a cake she liked online. The challenge for me was to recreate it, which, I must say, is challenging. The peach color was custom made using food coloring to match Frazee paint color “Endless Peach” that the bride picked from a paint color fan deck.

Cake Each tier has four layers of decadent chocolate blackout cake with three layers of filling. I added an extra egg to the recipe which I think really helped firm up the texture of the cake.

Filling Each layer of filling consists of a thin layer of passion fruit curd for instant zing and a thicker layer of creamy passion fruit Italian meringue buttercream so the flavor lingers on the tongue….Passion fruit, also known as lilikoi in Hawaii, has a very tangy, tropical flavor which, when paired with chocolate, is an absolutely amazing flavor combination. Something to make your taste buds tingle !!!

Icing Fondant over passion fruit Italian meringue buttercream.

Decoration The flowers were made by piping an outline of stiff color flow royal icing onto cellophane over a flower template and then filling in with thinned royal icing. When dry, the flowers were brushed with super pearl luster dust to give them a elegant sheen. The topper is held up with a bamboo skewer that was “glued” to the flower with a little royal icing. I used a computer aided drafting program called AutoCAD to create the templates for the flowers. I also used the program to draw the entire cake and layout the flowers so that the size of the flowers would be proportional to each tier and to the cake as a whole. I found the votives at Target which matched the design perfectly.

Thanks Blake and I are truly a wonderful team and I thoroughly enjoy working with him (so long as he does what I say ;-). But really, this art of mine would not exist without him. Blake colored all the fondant peach, rolled the fondant out for applying to the tiers (it’s a lot of hard work and I was sore for days afterwards) and painted all the flower decorations with pearl dust. He also did a little last minute grocery shopping and helped me finalize the design of the cake base. Blake was a life-saver as always and I am forever grateful to him for supporting me in my artistic endeavors!!