An Orchid Wedding

So I hinted in my last post that I had a special project that I rushed back from Thanksgiving for: this is it!  A wedding cake!  And quite possibly my favorite one that I've done to date.

Normally, I don't take wedding cake orders in the middle of the school year, much less on the weekend *right* after Thanksgiving (yes--try to cook a Thanksgiving dinner and make a wedding cake in one weekend...!) and *right* before finals/papers season.  But, when J approached me about making her wedding cake and told me that her wedding was an Asian theme, I just couldn't pass up the opportunity, especially since I'd been itching to make sugar orchids for ages now.  J was gracious enough to give me plenty of free reign in designing the cake, which I love, (her one request being that it be TALL) and when I finally sat down with her to show her my sketches, she picked out the one design that I'd sort of sketched as an improbable "fun" drawing, never meaning to make it.  But that's the one she wanted!

And I have to say, I love how it turned out!  The orchid flowers, buds, and leaves were all handmade out of sugar paste and painted with colored flower dust.  I was a bit worried for a while about how I would support the sugar orchids on a tall stem, but a trip to Home Depot totally solved that problem quickly (thanks to Anita of Dessert First and her husband, Mike, for pointing me in that direction), and the drama that the tall orchid stem added to the cake was fantastic.  People kept thinking they were real orchids on the cake, too!--even the bride, who was well-aware that I'd planned to make sugar flowers!

The cake itself was a dense dark chocolate cake with dark chocolate ganache studded with crystallized ginger slices, mango and fresh ginger curd, and mango and vanilla buttercreams.  J and S really wanted a mango and chocolate cake, and I added the touches of fresh and crystallized ginger to tie into the Chinese theme of the wedding.  The vertical buttercream stripes on the cake were meant to provide an illusion in the height of the cake.  And I particularly liked the white sugar pearls that I added at the last moment for even more texture and detail and to reflect the sparkles in J's wedding dress.

One of the best parts of the whole day was how incredibly well the cake matched the rest of the wedding.  The rooms were all decked out in a ravishing array of beautiful orchids of every type and shape and color imaginable, with tiny orchid plants on every table as party favors for the guests to large orchids scattered about the doors and entry tables.  The orchids on the cake even matched the orchid in J's hair perfectly, though we hadn't planned it that way at all.

Congratulations to J & S for their absolutely gorgeous wedding!  Thank you so much for letting me be a special part of it!

[For dessert and cake order inquires, please write to s {at} dessertsforbreakfast {dot} com.]