Anemone and Ranunculus Wedding Cake

Whew! It's been a busy past couple of weeks. Here are some pics of my first ever wedding cake. Most of you have seen these already but I wanted to post it for myself for when I make a book of all my blogs. This cake was an almond pound cake with raspberry cheescake italian meringue buttercream and homemade raspberry preserves and a coconut pound cake with lemon italian meringue buttercream. Yumm. I also made one more cake just to serve that was coconut pound with coconut flakes and coconut meringue buttercream. The flowers are all made out of gumpaste and the ones that are painted are painted with an edible paint. I had to teach myself how to make these flowers so it took me weeks to make 37 flowers. I could not have made this cake though without the help of Tina, Amy, Beth, and Nikki. Beth painted some ranunculus for me while I took Blake down to his endocronologist appt. She did an amazing job and the cake wouldn't have been as beautiful without them. I had a little disaster but I was saved by my wonderful team. On Thursday after a long day at the hospital with Blake, I came home and Tina and I put together two of the larger cakes. The two tiers were three pound cakes each and everything was made from scratch so it was satisfying to see two of them done. Well that night, before we put them together, I made the icing to cover them. I was distracted by a crying Blake and forgot to add the extra ingredient that makes it shelf stable. It wasn't part of the original recipe. It's something that you have to add at the end. Anyway we stayed up late putting the cakes together and icing them only to realize in the morning that I couldn't use them and had to start over. So Friday night my team and I made 6 new cakes and two more batches of icing, carved, leveled, and iced the two make up cakes, covered all cakes in fondant, finished my gumpaste flowers, and piped on the design. It was a lot of work and there is no way I could have done it without my team. I had Tina who's pregnant, Amy that had to leave for work by 4:30 the next morning and Nikki with fybromyalgia. I felt awful that they all stayed up so late working so hard but they refused to give up, so thank you so very, very, very much. Saturday Tina and I did the finishing touches and delivered the cake successfully only to have another little hiccup once we got there. We went to put the support dowels in only to realize that they were too long. I surprised myself and stayed semi calm and we figured out how to fix it without a saw. Aunt Aleatha helped me place the flowers and it was awesome to see it finished. It was better than I had even envisioned. Thank you so much to all those that helped. Even those of you that watched the boys. I couldn't have done it without all of you.