Spencer Wedding- 5/26/12 Part 1

The 'Bride's Cake'.  It is a chocolate stout cake with a fudge filling and frosting and then was wrapped in white fondant. 

The 'sample cupcakes' I made for the couple for a family dinner. 



The first step in the process was narrowing down flavor choices to only three.  Chocolate and lemon were decided on almost immediately.  But we still had one to go.  Informal surveys were conducted and in the end, the third flavor decided upon was carrot cake. 



And from another angle. 

 I secured the availability of the huge kitchen I work in every day.  My boss was going to let us invade and use her twenty-four count muffin pans and double ovens!  Awesome.  We packed up our ingredients and drove across town and got to work.  Five hours and five hundred and seventy-four cupcakes later, we had everything boxed up but not frosted. 

The next day was spent working on the actual wedding cakes.  A few weeks prior the bride, my cousin Jennifer, called and had asked for a seperate cake for her husband-to-be.  In all of the third flavor discussion, the groom had stated his desire to have a yellow cake with choclate frosting as a choice.  It was immediately dismissed, because yellow cake with choclate frosting is fine for a church basement after a funeral, but not very impressive. (*Note- I'm not trying to offend whoever served yellow cake with chocolate frosting at their wedding.  But, really?) Anyway, Jennifer had called me and asked for a seperate 'Groom's Cake' to be made for the groom, Jeff.  He loves cupcakes, he loves yellow cake and, being from Nebraska, he obviously loves the Cornhuskers.  So the giant Cornhuskers cupcake was added to the order. It was a simple yellow cake with the same chocolate fudge frosting as the bride's cake and the chocolate cupcakes.



The 'Groom's Cake' in the process of being made

And later on the display table at the reception. 

The 'cupcake liner' was white chocolate, which was my awesome mom's idea.  The giant cupcake pan is silicone so it was very easy to paint the interior of it.  After letting it harden, I simply peeled the silicone rubber away from the hard chocolate, leaving me with a large chocolate cup. I spread a thin layer of white buttercream over the base of the giant cupcake and then slid it into the liner.  It cracked cleanly in two places, which I was anticipating.  I was trying to put a cake into a chocolate shell that was the same exact size as the cake.  It was patched with red candy melts, making a striped pattern on the liner.  It was filled with fudge and then topped with chocolate fudge frosting. 

Then came the decoration of it.  I already knew I wanted to make a chocolate piece to sit on the cupcake and have it be very cleary Cornhuskers-related.  I started by melting a large amout of white chocolate in different colors.  The 'N' was the hardest part, as it needed to be straight lines and clean angles.  After that, I made the corn on the cob for it to sit on.  It was hand-piped on by the kernel.  Finally, it was all stuck together with yet more melted chocolate.  Altogether, I would bet the decoration weighed close to three pounds. 

More coming in part two.....