Blue Wedding Cake(s)

How often do you see a blue wedding cake?  Or six of them at one wedding, for that matter?  I was tickled with excitement when approached by my sister to design the wedding cake for her Las Vegas wedding.  The only request: I want a blue wedding cake.  With complete artistic license bestowed upon me from a trusting sister, I started to think of ways to make this wedding cake into something unique, unordinary, and unforgettable!

Blue Wedding Cakes

Whenever I'm asked to design a cake, I typically base the original designs off of (1) the wedding dress, (2) the wedding ring, and (3) the wedding flowers/colors.  I was stuck with traditional wedding cake ideas streaming through my mind, but it wasn't until I started to look beyond the typical cake that the ideas started to form into something I knew would be perfect for my sister.  Firstly, I decided it would be more meaningful to make six cakes--each representing a member of her imminently meshed family.  Further delving into this avenue, I figured it would be appropriate to make the six cakes extremely different--utilizing different ingredients, decorations, and techniques--again representing not only six different individuals, but six people who are extremely different from one another.

The shape of wedding cakes are hardly ever experimented with; and for that reason, I was determined to think of a shape for the wedding cake that I had never seen before.  I chose to make each cake 6-inches wide and 8-inches tall.  After searching on the internet for days, I found the perfect glass pedestals (with differing heights) to further accentuate the column-like feel.  I purchased a variety of blue decorating materials and embellishments along with a lot of blue fondant, blue food color gels, and blue decorating dusts--without any definite design plan fully formed.  With all the materials in front of me, I was able to create the designs as I worked--which is usually what works best with me.

Using a steady hand to decorate

After a lot of patience and meticulous work, the six cakes were complete and the only thing left to worry about was the six hour trip down to the strip!  The following are the final designs I came up with:

For the first design, I made blue fondant tiles, cut freehandedly.  I used icing to fasten the tiles to the cake and then additional icing to add a blue icing grout.  For some added bling, I used royal icing to attach edible sugar sapphires where the grout lines intersected.

For the second design, I mimicked the design of the bride's wedding dress using blue fondant ripples.  This seemed to be everyone's favorite design.  It really was stunning and actually turned out to be the cake the bride and groom chose to cut.

The third cake was completely covered in blue edible sparkles.  I mean, it was a Vegas wedding, right?  I was a little apprehensive about doing an entire cake coated in glitter, but the end product was undeniably spectacular.

The bride's wedding bouquet was a beautiful collection of blue roses.  To tie in this element in cake number four, I recreated blue roses using the fondant and used them to embellish the top of a fondant pleated cake.

For the fifth cake, I dyed coconut roasted the flakes to allow the color to set in.  The dying process actually took some time, but once I got the flakes to the right shade, it was easy to coat the cake and admire the end product.  It actually looked like blue hydrangeas from a distance.

For the last cake, I made a circular lattice design using the extra blue fondant and filled in all of the empty space with blue dragees.  Each dragee was individually placed, so yes, it took quite a bit of time to make, but I was so happy with how it looked in the end, the time was well worth it.  Everyone thought this cake was a candle it was so detailed.

Needless to say, the cake(s) was(were) a success and most importantly, the bride and groom were so pleased with the design and taste.  The cake was a double chocolate fudge recipe with an addition of my secret spices that enhance the flavor and my personal buttercream recipe.  It was delicious!

Blue Wedding Cake Bite

Posing with my Blue Wedding Cakes