7Th Heaven

by Milena
(The Netherlands)

7th Heaven

My Second Cake

Well this is the second cake I have made, the first being my daughter's cake for her 2nd birthday.

The Inspiration

It was for a friend of mine who is an architect just like me. The idea was that they are in the clouds, ecstatic that they are getting married and floating above the town. The branches of the tree and the flowers symbolize their determination to reach high and their ever renewing hope.

The Cake

The cake is chocolate with almond flavored butter cream, covered with white and black MM fondant. The bride and the groom are made of gum paste and the clouds are a little bit melted marshmallows.

What I Learned

Technically I had a lot of problems with this cake. Maybe it is understandable since I don't have any experience with making and decorating cakes, so I started my research online. God bless youtube and people that want to share their experience and expertise. I learned that you cannot make wedding cake figurines with fondant, you need to make a gum-paste out of it.

I learned...

How to make butter-cream, and that it is important to crumb coat your cake.
How to be creative when your chocolate cake falls apart and you need to put it back together using the same butter cream as a glue.

How to stuck it using dowels for support (these were all new terms for me).

The biggest problem is that I am a Macedonian living in the Netherlands using an American recipe!?!?!? A lot of the ingredients you cannot find here, and for the other part I don't know the translation in Dutch, so you have to be resourceful and do the research, e.g. you can only buy icing sugar in small quantities here in the regular supermarket 7-8oz, and they contain some stuff so that the sugar doesn't get sticky but this ruins your fondant if you are making it yourself from marshmallows and it loses the elasticity entirely.

Nevertheless I had a great time making this cake, I learned a lot and am still learning (I continued making cakes and I am currently making my 5th cake lol) and the most important of all, my friends loved the cake, it was unique and specially designed for them.