Wedding Cakes

On Friday Sparkly Date Palm (the boyfriend's sister) got married. A few months ago, while she was looking for wedding venues, she told me that she wasn't having a wedding cake, as the venue charged so much for them. Trying to be helpful, I said 'I'll make it for you'! Seemed a good idea at the time! I do quite a bit of baking, but I've never properly iced a cake in my life. However, always up for a challenge I rolled up my sleeves, put on my apron and away I went ...

Two weekends ago I set to work on some practice cakes. The boyfriend took his self-imposed task of chief cake-tester very seriously! The cake was a three tier cake, with a fruit cake on the bottom. I used my mum's Christmas cake recipe and it smelled like Christmas when it came out of the oven;

Next came probably the largest chocolate cake I've ever made;

And finally a sponge cake with jam and buttercream, unfortunately I had a bit of a problem with sinking tummies on my sponges but they tasted OK. So here we are, all three cakes, iced, decorated and ready to go:

Looks pretty good, If I may say so myself :)