Monday 1 March 2010

Chocolate wedding cake

Jo: Early last year I offered to make my sister’s wedding cake, for her wedding in September. That offer was promptly quashed by my family as I was advised against taking on the stress of doing that and being bridesmaid on the day. The other issue was that she has expensive taste and grand visions of what she wanted in a cake. After attending the Designer Wedding Show and looking at the beautiful Linda Fripp cakes, she was smitten. After checking out the price of one of Linda’s incredible creations, she asked if I was still interested in doing it!

The groom is a complete chocoholic so it had to be chocolate, despite my dad’s protestations against a black wedding cake ("It's so unromantic!"). I looked on the internet and picked out a few designs and we settled on a square 3-tiered chocolate cake decorated with chocolate curls, fruit to fill the gaps between each tier and flowers on top. A variety of flavours and cake bases were tested and we even did a blind tasting with both the families to try. The result was unanimously in favour of the chocolate cake with raspberry filling, (well, almost unanimous...except for the groom who opted for chocolate & orange!)
A resounding success, masses of compliments ensued and I felt very smug!

Although I got up at 7am to start and I was still assembling the cake an hour before the ceremony (eek!) I know that if I were to make another one it would take half the time and be relatively stress-free. I would do it again in a flash if anyone were to ask me.

I’m a bit embarrassed to say it, but the cake recipe I used is actually the first one that comes up on Google if you type in “wedding cake recipe”! It's from BBC Good Food Magazine.

The icing and filling was just a basic ganache recipe (equal quantities of chocolate and double cream) layered up with raspberries, and then the chocolate curls (bought from squires-shop.com) were stuck on to the ganache. Simples!

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