Gemma 
It’s time for another wedding cake!
If you’re new here, I am by no means a professional baker, but I did stumble into the world of wedding cake baking last year, when I made the cake for my brother’s wedding (a deconstructed, three-tier, chocolate, coffee & lemon cake that you can find here!). I then fell even further down the wedding cake rabbit hole later on in the year, when I made an Orange & Olive Oil cake for a family friend’s big day!
Before this year, then, the number of wedding cakes I had made was a grand total of… 2. Over the last month, that total has doubled, because from mid-August to mid-September, I made another two wedding cakes! After my brother’s wedding, a couple of his friends asked me to make their wedding cakes (SO exciting!!) and I got to working on the designs & recipes straight away. Both weddings have now taken place, vows have been made and cakes have been sliced, so I can finally share the recipes with you!
So, with that…
Welcome to Wedding Cake Week: Season 2!
Over the next 4 days, I’ll be sharing all of the recipes, techniques and behind-the-scenes info for the first of the wedding cakes: the Chocolate, Cherry and Cardamom cake that I made for Florrie and Mohit.
This cake was inspired by a recipe created by Meera Sodha for a chocolate cake that is filled with a cardamom & mascarpone cream icing and cherry jam. My version is made using my all-time favourite chocolate cake recipe (the one I developed for my brother’s wedding cake!), a cardamom-infused American buttercream, a homemade cherry jam and an abundance of chocolate curls (which, as it turns out, are incredibly easy to make at home!).
Here’s the schedule for the week ahead:
Tuesday: Homemade Cherry Jam Recipe
Wednesday: Easy Chocolate Curls
Thursday: Chocolate, Cherry and Cardamom Cake Recipe
Friday: Chocolate, Cherry and Cardamom Cake (The Rectangular Version) Recipe
A little note: because we’ll be deep in chocolate curls on Wednesday, there won’t be a WIP Wednesday post this week! Don’t worry though, you won’t be missing anything— in Week 4 of making my Porcelain Sweater, I knit a grand total of… 6 rows of rib. Check back in next week for some more interesting progress (hopefully!).
Florrie & Mohit specifically requested a simple, 8-inch round cake as their main cake, so, to ensure that there was plenty of cake to go round all of their friends and family, I also made a bigger, rectangular version of the cake that could be sliced in the kitchen and served to the guests once the main cake had been cut (kind of like a loaves-and-fishes situation, where the cake just miraculously keeps coming!).
I used this approach with my last wedding cake and I think it’s a really neat way of doing things because it gives you SO much more flexibility with the size of the main cake. Because of this, you guys get two recipes for the price of one: an 8-inch round version of the cake (on Thursday) and a 13 x 9-inch rectangular version of the cake (on Friday)!
I hope I’ll see you back here tomorrow to talk all things cherry jam!
Gemma
xxx
