Should I bake my good friends wedding cake with little experience in such endeavors?
The year to practice is a benefit, to be sure. Sadly, you may have to think about whether you can be both a bridesmaid and the cake baker. Typically, the cakes are baked and semi-decorated a day ahead, then assembled and completed on-site. Depending on how big the thing is, the assembly can take a few hours…especially if you have to do a lot of detail work on the decorations…or have to do repairs. I suggest you start doing some test cakes to get a handle on how long it will take you to complete a wedding cake. Then judge. I will pray that the cake is for a small group. Good luck. Take pictures!
If you already have some experience and a year to learn, there’s no reason you can’t manage a good cake. The problem I see is that you’re also a bridesmaid, and at the time you’ll need to set up the cake, you’ll be busy with bridesmaid stuff. Wedding cakes are generally not just delivered whole and plopped down in place; you have to do a fair amount of assembly and decoration at the reception hall. And what if something goes wrong? Are you experienced in fixing a falling-apart cake? You don’t want your nice gesture to be remembered as a disaster in all the photos. I would say leave this one to the pros who have staffs and more importantly aren’t members of the wedding party. Maybe make a rocking shower cake and even a rehearsal dinner cake, but not the wedding cake.
I have done this so I can at least tell you its possible! We (three people) made a three tier kosher cake with a ying-yang cats on top, and then transported it from NYC to Boston. And I was the best man 🙂 The baking it self was easy, though I would *not* recomend doing this without a kitchen aid style mixer. It was, however, very time consuming. We spent about one full weekend baking and making frosting, call it 16 hours. Add to that a few hours to get the ingredients and baking supplies (we bought a lot of pans). Total supply cost was about $200. To transport the cake we froze the individual sections, uncut and unassembled, and put them in several coolers for the car trip to Boston. We then assembled the cake in Boston and drove it (carefully!) to the wedding site, where we displayed it. The assembly took about three hours the morning of the wedding. Lessons learned: * A detailed schedule and checklist, posted on the wall during baking, was invaluable. With three people we created a
I think it has to depend on you clearly understanding your BF’s expectations (and, secondarily, how the expectations of the guests will be shaped). I made a cake for good friends that was far beyond anything I’d done (and if you’re down with fondant you’re ahead of me already). It was 4 tiers of 3 layers (with a both a marzipan ribbon and another interior layer), but because I had some lead time and was making sections ahead (some frozen) I knew it tasted good. What made me anxious was transporting it in layers, assembling it (with the whole interior dowel rod and platform construction) and then finishing the exterior with ribbon, gold dust, etc. But here’s the thing–when I got to the casual, outdoor, cross-cultural wedding, attended by lots of funky artists, it really didn’t matter that the whole thing listed to one side pretty badly. It looked both good and homemade, and was even reasonably photogenic (from one angle). In short, I knew that there was some tolerance, if not for failu
I would highly recommend making the cake two weeks in advance (and freezing it) rather than two days. The closer you get to the wedding the more things will tend to go wrong. Leave yourself time to cope with them, especially as a bridesmaid. You don’t have time to both assemble the cake and be a bridesmaid on the wedding day. This is impossible. One (or likely both) of these activities will run longer than you think. Things go wrong. The reason it takes three hours (or did for us) was that the cake layers were uneven and had to be cut down, our first tier support solution did not go as planned, and frosting took longer than planned. The bottom tier of our three tier cake consisted of four quarter circle sections rather than one big section (for reasons of oven size, number of people fed, and transport logistics), which added to the time as well. You can do this if you want to (and you should, I had an awesome time making the cake and being the best man). But you need to know that thing
