The following posts will be dedicated to my daughter's recent wedding (end of August). I was honored to make her cake (created essentially for the slicing photo -they had a cupcake tower along with a dessert bar), the floral arrangements (about 24), her bouquet, corsages, and boutonnieres. I thought you could learn a few tricks from my experience with the chocolate and the pastry shells.The kids wanted to serve my fresh homemade ginger ale so I purchased over 4# of ginger, peeled and sliced all of it. The ginger gets simmered in sugar water then is cooled and mixed with club soda. Delicious! You can find various recipes for this on-line. This time (instead of sending the ginger to the compost) I tried tossing the cooked slices with granulated sugar then air dried them. You then have candied ginger , which I love to eat and no longer have to buy!
A trick I discovered with making tiny pastry rounds was to use a muddler to gently push the dough rounds into the tiny cupcake holder. They were to be filled with lemon and lime curd for creamy citrus-y tarts. The wedding colors were citrus (orange and lime) and brown so the tarts looked great on the dessert bar.
About the Wedding Cake-to keep with the organic branch and bird theme, I made chocolate leaves and twigs to decorate it. My artistic son gave me a great sketch of a branch which I placed a sheet of wax paper over and with melted chocolate, outlined the branch with a small frosting tip. The chocolate was runnier than I would have liked so they turned out looking more like antlers than twigs. So the remedy was to carefully shave the ends into more of a point. For the leaves, I tried rose leaves first but found them way too soft and were not easily peeled from chocolate. Then I tried salal (some florists refer to it as lemon leaves) and that worked. You paint a thick layer on the vein side (underside) and let harden. Then carefully peel off. As the day was very warm and they needed to be transported over 1 1/2 hours to their home (garden wedding), I placed the container the leaves/twigs were in on frozen ice bags, then covered it with newspaper & towels and then put it on the front passenger floor and cranked up the air conditioning. My feet froze but they made it to their destination! There I frosted the 4 layers then carefully peeled off the twigs and placed them onto the cake. The leaves were at the base.
For an amateur I must say it looked pretty good.
The next posting will be the fantastic flowers I had the joy to work with.
