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Saturday, October 11, 2008

Research and Development

Well, I bought the Wilton pan, using a 40% off coupon from JoAnn's, and started to do some research ahead of starting to bake. We are baking both white cakes and chocolate cakes. Since the groom doesn't like chocolate cake, it made sense to split our cakes so that M works on white cake and I work on chocolate cake.

If there's one thing I know about myself, it's that I have a tendency to get a wee bit obsessed with new projects, especially if they seem fun and don't involve my actual paying job. When the project involves cake, the likelihood of obsession grows. My first stop for information on wedding cake decorating was, as usual, the Internet. Almost immediately, I stumbled across Cake Central, an extensive site with tutorials, image galleries, and a lively user forum. I began saving photos of cakes that looked good, and sharing them with M. She approved a few, and gave me some ideas.

The wedding colors are pink and either red or raspberry, so we will probably ice each cake in varying shades of pink. Red is such a strong color it's difficult to achieve in frosting and tends to result in a nasty taste in the icing. M still really likes the fondant look, and I hope to become proficient enough with it to cover the head table's cake in white fondant, to really separate it from the other cakes.

Ideas in hand, next I went to my library in search of books, both for ideas and for tutorials and techniques. I especially liked the detailed instructions in Debbie Brown's 50 Easy Party Cakes, though none of the designs are suited to a wedding cake. After reading many books, I decided that the simplest thing to do would be to ice each cake in buttercream and then top it with unique decorations, including large sugar crystals, edible pearls, fondant flowers, pearl or luster dust, or edible glitter.

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