Our Wedding Cake

It's been a while since I last posted wedding details and thought I would post about our delicious wedding cake. When Hubs proposed I knew exactly who I was going to go to for our wedding cake. A cook/baker at work has her own cake business on the side and I've seen/tasted her work and its absolutely fantastic. All her mixes are homemade (not from a box) and she grows a lot of the berries she uses fresh in her own garden. I set up an appointment right away to meet with her to discuss our options and pricing and to book her to do our cake. Just an fyi, we booked her in February 2009 for our July 2010 wedding as she only does one wedding cake a weekend depending on the complexity of the cake, and we were lucky we did. By the time our wedding came around she had over 20 brides calling to book our date. Joanne's owns Tiers of Joy and her work can be viewed on her website http://www.tiersofjoycakes.ca/. 

I was super picky when it came to our wedding cake. I've worked many weddings and seen cakes that were leaning over, cracked or just looked plain sloppy. Not to mention many had no taste, were dry and the fondant was awful tasting. Having sampled Joanne's cakes, her's have none of these problems. Her cakes are delicious, moist and best of all her fondant tastes like sweet marshmallow's. Also, having worked functions I knew I didn't want to go with a grocery store cake (not knocking any one who has, it just wasn't the right place to get our cake based on past experiences) and some of the bakeries around here charge an astronomical amount of money for a wedding cake.

Our wedding cake went through a few different inspirations. Initially we wanted a beach themed cake with shells (when we were planning on a beach themed wedding), then I wanted a cake with ribbons like this one:

Hubs said he felt this one was a little plain for us, so we went back to Joanne and came up with this as our wedding cake:

Our cake ended up being 4 tiers, with the bottom tier being an orange creamsicle, the next tier was a chocolate cake with chocolate ganache, the 3rd tier was lemon and the final tier was orange creamsicle again. The alternating tiers had a lace pattern on them, the Brooches on the bows were similar to the one on my wedding dress, the flowers on top were sugar orchids to mimic the flowers in our centerpieces and bouquets and the brown bows and aqua ribbon arounf the bottom of each tier tied in our wedding colors.

We received so many compliments on our cake, how beautiful it was and how yummy it tasted. Many people even commented on how they had a couple pieces even though they generally don't eat sweets. Most of the cake was eaten at the reception with the exception of a few pieces of the chocolate and lemon layer that were left at the end of the night and we brought home (Most weddings I've worked, the majority of the cake is left uneaten and thrown out at the end of the night). We also saved our top layer, froze it and its now sitting in our freezer to be taken out and eaten on our first anniversary.