Every girl dreams of her wedding. For many this day comes with a fitting wedding cake. I was no different. My dream was a three layer wedding cake, romantic and bariqoue. So I went and tried to find a baker to make one for me. But the requirement that it should be fructose free apparently was an impossible challenge for all of them. One of the answers I got when asking for a fructose free wedding cake was
„We can’t bake this, because we can’t tell if it’s going to look representative“.
This statement made me think in a lot of ways. Apparently no one cared that the wedding cake would taste representative. To me, the taste is so much more important than the looks. In the past two years I’ve made lots of experiences with fructose intolerance and on of them was that fructose free food doesn’t have to taste bad.
Long story short, if I wanted a fructose free wedding cake, I’d have to take matters into my own hands. And as you may have guessed, it worked. Otherwise I wouldn’t have anything to write now.
In this article, I want to take you through the planning and creation of my wedding cake.
I already told you how I got the idea of baking my own wedding cake. What I had to do now was to get an idea on how it should look and taste.
In the end we decided on a „standard“ three layer wedding cake. The upper layer (from now on „cake 1“) we wanted a tiramisu cake. Below that, in the middle layer (from now on „cake 2“) we decides on a lemon-strawbery cake and the bottom layer (from now on „cake 3“) would be a chocolate- buttercreme- cake.
After having decided on the taste, all that was left was the looks. „Standard“ doesn’t quite come close here, since our wedding cake should match the occasion. And our wedding was anything but „standard“. We were celebrating a gothic wedding and thus our cake should belong to the „dark romanticism“ category.
Therefore, cakes 1 and 3 are going to be in white and cake 2 in red. The decoration on cakes 1 and 3 is going to be black lace and cake 2 is going to get a nice leather couch look with white pearls. The concept will be finished off with a black scarf and some roses.
Since I wouldn’t be able to do my wedding cake without the use of fondant, I had to find a way to make fructose free fondant. Until now I haven’t been able to. If you know a way, please let me know in a comment or mail. So I baked a trial cake and covered it with fondant. I let it cool down for two days. This pointed me towards a challenge with fondant: It starts to „sweat“ after a while and becomes liquid on the bottom so little bits of fondant remain on the cake, even if you’re removing it prior to eating.
Anyway, I tried the cake and was able to handle it. After having confirmed this, I was ready to go and cold work on the recipes for my project. After a few more tries and errors, I had found the perfect mix.
After all these preparation, the day when I’d say yes was coming closer and this meant one thing: baking! I baked all three cakes in a single day and covered them with ganache.
The ganache consists mainly of fat therefore and keeps wetness away. This delays the process of „sweating“ for a while. Alternatively you could also cover your cake with a very fatty butter cream. The butter cream from cake 3’s recipe isn’t fit for this though.
As mentioned above, fondant starts sweating after a while. This is because of humidity and the wetness of the cake, because fondant mainly consists of sugar and therefore attracts water. The uppoermost layer of fondant thus becomes wet, which is called „sweating“.
The day before the wedding I spent with covering and decorating the cake,
During this process I gathered lots of information about fondant and found an interesting blog entry by Kuchenfee Lisa. She compared different types of fondant in terms of consistence, taste and usability. Herr favorite was „Massa Ticino“ and after having tried it, I can only agree. The fondant is great to work with, only sweats a little and – according to my guests – tastes great. There’s one downside though: it’s rather expensive.
Before I covered the cake I also did the cake lace. For this I used the „Magic Dekor“ product line. And after only a few tries, I got some very nice results. To color the lace I used lots and lots of food coloring and I can imagine that it’s going to be the same for other colors as well – at least if you want strong colors, that is. To harden the lace I chose the oven option which worked more or less. You have to figure out the timing, otherwise it’s either too sticky or already breaking apart.
To stack the cakes I put them on a cake board during baking already and kept the board underneath each cake while covering it with ganache and fondant. This gave them a solid bottom and made them easier to stack.
After having covered and decorated the cakes, I used thick wooden sticks to support layers two and three. I put them in 6cm from the outside of the cake and placed them like this:
To make sure the layers were even I put the first stick on the lowermost part of the layer and then used it as a measure for the others.
To make sure the layers don’t slip off, I used some of the leftover ganache as glue during stacking. Afterwards I put on the remaining decorations,
Project „wedding cake“ was very daring, but I’m glad I took on the challenge. My wedding cake was a huge success!
