Wedding cakes purchased commercially are very expensive, and seem like an easy DIY “cheat” for many brides (or their thrifty mothers). Having been there and done that, I’d caution that making – let alone decorating – your own wedding cake is not for the faint of heart.
Baking is a passion of mine, and icing cakes a hobby. Over the years I’ve done several wedding cakes, including my own. I enjoy it, and it’s definitely become less stressful as I’ve improved, but I still experience two or three “Why did I agree to do this?” moments per cake. It’s not that baking or even decorating cakes is hard, per se; it’s the logistics. Wedding cakes mean you’re dealing with a lot of ingredients, hired cake tins, as many as eight or ten bricks of fondant, and an absolutely unchangeable deadline.
I’m not trying to put people off making their own cakes, but there are certainly some questions you should answer honestly before you take it on:
What kind of cake and icing do you want?
Fruit cakes iced with fondant are the most DIY-friendly, as they can be completed weeks or even months in advance. A sponge cake iced with buttercream, on the other hand, has to be made the day before at the earliest, right when you’ll have fifty last-minute wedding things to do. You’ll also need a recipe which doubles (or quadruples!) successfully.
How confident are you as a baker?
Most cake recipes are simple enough, but you’ll be dealing with huge quantities – a ruined batch could put you out $100. If the thought of mixing eight cups of sugar and twelve bricks of butter in a huge bucket makes you break into a cold sweat, it might not be worth the stress.
How confident are you at icing cakes?
Fondant isn’t hard to work with – with a good, glycerine-containing brand, it’s like playing with Playdough – and there are plenty of tricks to make a simple cake look good. But you do need practice. For buttercream or royal icing, you’ll need more. Try a few birthday cakes and see how you go before committing to the big one.
What are the logistics of the days before the wedding?
Even if you make and ice the cake ahead of time, it’ll need to be taken to the reception venue at some point. You can often rope a friend into doing this, but bear in mind if the wedding is out of town, the cake might have to do a fair bit of traveling. Can the type of cake and icing you want survive a hot car, or a few days in a hotel room? Will your house be filled with relatives and small children the week before the wedding? Will there be room in the kitchen to ice the cake in peace?
A wedding cake I iced a few years back, decorated with plaited flax and flax flowers for a casual Kiwi wedding.
How fussy are you about the final product?
Many of the cakes I’ve made have followed an extremely simple formula – three stacked tiers iced with ivory fondant, and decorated by a ribbon around the bottom of each tier and a cake topper, provided by the florist, on top. I have been known to grumble at the lack of excitement in icing such a basic design, but brides choose it for a reason – it looks good.
If this is the kind of cake you want, making your own cake should be very doable. If, on the other hand, you want an eight-tier cake covered in realistic fondant roses, or an accurate scale model of the USS Enterprise, you may find you have bitten off more than you can chew. If everything has to be just so, let an expert do it. (On the other hand, if you’re a go-with-the-flow type of bride, making your own cake can be quite liberating – cover up any cracks and flaws with flowers, ribbon or piped swirls and see what happens!)
How much money are you expecting to save?
Making your own cake probably will save money, but not necessarily enough to compensate you for the stress and time involved. You’ll probably have to pay for a huge quantity of ingredients, a large quantity of fondant (unless you make your own), hiring cake tins, a few pieces of equipment such as icing smoothers, a marble rolling pin, a bucket to mix the cake and a piping set; plus the ingredients and equipment to make a few small practice cakes. If you want a colourful cake, bear in mind that those small tubes of powdered colour add up fast. It’s all a worthwhile investment if you plan to do a lot of cakes, but for a one-off the outlay might seem excessive.
If this all sounds off-putting, you may have options other than the bakery. Ask around your friends and family for amateur decorators – some might do the job for the cost of the ingredients only, as a wedding present, or at least at a cheaper rate than a professional. You could also try asking your cake decorating shop if you could bake the cakes yourself and hand them over to be iced. It may even be possible to mask the cake yourself (apply the fondant) and purchase icing roses or marzipan critters from the cake decorating shop to decorate it. Or you could follow the current trend of wedding cakes made with cupcakes – they’re easy to make, freeze and ice, and enough of them arranged on a tiered platter look spectacular no matter what you do!
