Browsing through the KA site I spotted a wedding cake that reminded me of mine, clicked and ended up here. Reading through this post made me realize how crazy I was to have made my own wedding cake! It was so rewarding though, and to be fair....I had help from my talented mother-in-law....and in the end our local small town florist:) The cake we made was adapted from a Martha Stewart book...I think. My mother in law made it for Easter the year of our August wedding(knowing I wanted to make my own), and said..."what do you think?" It was a delicious yellow cake with lemon curd and syrup soaked layers with a white chocolate/cream cheese frosting. Yum! I was sold. To be honest, we did not bake another sample after that, and made the cake itself only about a week or so before the wedding. She made the cake, and used her own "go-to" traditional Austrian cake recipe(sponge) that used a ton of eggs, and she made it in sheet pans. As she cranked out the cake, I did all the cutting, assembling, and icing. We had a tiered cake tower, so I did not have to worry about stacking, but we did have to bore a hold through each layer(how did we do that? hmm can't totally remember) so that we could screw it together with a center post. I made each layer on a cardboard base, then iced it, and did some simple piping around the top and bottom. Froze it unwrapped until hard, then wrapped each layer in several layers of plastic. I think the key was the fact that the cream cheese and chocolate icing was sturdy enough to handle being frozen, piping and all. The other thing that really made it all possible was the reception was in the same building as the kitchen I baked in, which is a big beautiful old building that the family owns and runs a furniture store out of here in Maine. So it only needed to be transported up stairs. I was planning on finding and cutting my own flowers to top each layer(for the bouquets too), but two days before the wedding when I realized that I was running out of time and energy, I stopped by my local florist who saved the day. She ordered me some beautiful un-sprayed flowers....and here's where living in the small town really pays off. It just so happened that my caterer(also a local) had already recruited her to wait tables at the reception, and so she agreed to put the cake together and top it with the flowers. Phew...I was off the hook! She also ended up putting together the bouquets last minute too, and they were beautiful! Had she not stepped up, I the cake and flowers would not have been nearly as nice. In the end, we ended up making a sheet cake too(last minute) just in case, and good thing we did because there wasn't a single piece of cake left(except of course the top)! Everyone raved about it, and even my toughest critic, my Dad, who is a chef and has catered many weddings, said it was the best wedding cake he ever had. It was totally worth it. So...one way or another, even overly ambitious projects have a way of coming together:) My advice...go for it, ask for help, and have a back up plan! Now I want to eat that cake....think I might have to recreate it for our 5 year anniversary this summer....

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