Baking Your Own Wedding Cake

Many brides prefer to bake their own wedding cakes instead of getting a store bought one. Baking your own cake can be a cost effective alternative to buying one, but bear in mind, it takes a lot of effort and time to bake a wedding cake. But if you are adamant about doing it on your own, here are some tips that you will find extremely helpful:

1) Get help!

First and foremost, enlist some help. Like we said before, baking your own cake is not going to be easy, so get your mum, sisters, and all your girlfriends to help you out.

2) Baking the wedding cake:

• Always use fresh ingredients. The eggs, sugar, flour, and all other ingredients should be absolutely fresh.
• Do a trial run of your cake recipe before you begin baking the actual wedding cake. If your recipe does not turn out ok, or if you don't like the taste, you will have only wasted your time with the trial cake and not with the entire wedding cake.
• Remember to use unsalted butter for the cake. If your recipe calls for margarine, you can substitute it with unsalted butter for a richer flavor and taste.
• Make the batter for all the tiers of the cake at one go and put them in the different sized cake tins. If you have a small oven which will not hold all the tins at once, you can bake them separately.
• To check if the cake has baked thoroughly, put a pointed skewer or knife into the centre of the cake. If it comes out clean, your cake is done.

3) Icing and decorating the cake:

• Never ice a hot cake (unless otherwise specified). A cooled cake is easier to work with and will ice better than a hot one.
• Decorate each tier one at a time. Keep all other tiers covered.
• Rich fruit cakes should never be stored in the fridge and cakes iced in fondant icing should never be stored in the fridge either because they will attract condensation and absorb flavours. 
• Any sugarcraft decorations will go soft in a fridge, but they can survive for weeks if they are just left covered, but not in an airtight box.

4) Assembling the cake:

• Put each layer onto cardboard pieces hat will support the weight of the cake. Assemble the layers in the right order and make sure that they balance perfectly on each other.

Rich fruit cakes can be made as far in advance as possible as their flavour matures in time. Making your cake early also means that you have less to do in the immediate build up to the big day.