Vera Wang wedding cake

Posted by crummb on March 15, 2011. Birthday cakes, Wedding cakes - 10 Comments

I didn’t wear a Vera Wang gown at my wedding (because I couldn’t bloody afford one). So as a bizarre form of vicarious reaction, I will spend the rest of my life making up for it by making Vera Wang cakes. And this is the first one.

E first approached me wanting a wedding cake with starfish on it because both she and her fiance are avid divers. Now I was really cracking my brainbox over this because for the life of me, I couldn’t think of a way to make starfish look good on cake. And then I found out she was wearing Vera Wang. This one.

Furggid about starfish already, girl! I hollered to her on email. Have a Vera cake! The huge, frilly thing on the model’s shoulder can be modelled into a gumpaste flower. The stripes on the gown can wrap around all three tiers of the cake too. E’s concern is that an all-white cake would look too washed out. But with all those frills and contours going on, it will look texturous and classy. No worries, I told her.

So a few days before the wedding, I went about making what I hoped will be the show-stopping flower. It took an entire afternoon of building up at least 18 layers of frills, and another 15 wired outer petals.

This was the second flower I did. The first one bombed.

This is what it looked like from the back. The wires, when bunched up together and taped, was as thick as a tree branch.

The flower was left to dry while I covered my three cake tiers with pristine white fondant.

Initially I wanted to replicate the asymmetrical stripes on the gown. But looking at the actual cake before me, I thought there would be too much going on, so I kept the stripes horizontal but decreasing in width as it went down the tiers. So the focus would still be on the flower.

I’m very happy with the way the flower turned out, but not so much the stripes. I should’ve waited for them to firm up more before I attached them, so they look neater and crisper. Hopefully the next time I make a Vera Wang cake, I would’ve had ironed out all these problems. The cake, I swear, will be good enough to wear.