5 Tier Wedding Cake

This week I was able to make a HUGE wedding cake. While I was VERY excited about it I was also very scared about it. Wedding cakes are important. They are in tons of pictures. If the cake is a mess it has potential to ruin a wedding. Trust me... I've seen MANY a case on Judge Judy. lol

I made a schedule so that I would be sure to finish everything on time and I started baking on time. Day 1 was very uneventful. Day 2 was filled with FROSTING! It was a new recipe that the customer had sampled at her taste-testing and chose from the options. I made 28 cups of frosting.

After dinner with my family I started frosting the cakes. I could tell immediately there was going to be problems. It should never take 5 hours to frost 5 cakes. It should take maybe 1-1 1/2 hours because you are frosting, then waiting for the icing to crust a bit, and then smoothing them out. What was happening was the icing was "heavy" and it was sliding down the sides of the cake and puddling at the bottom. :/ At midnight I finally decided I was quitting for the night and heading for the treadmill.

When I got up in the morning this is what I saw when I examined the cakes:

ICING SLIDING DOWN...

VISIBLE SEAMS

  

How was I going to put decorations on top of frosting that couldn't stay where it was supposed to??? When I saw what the cakes looked like I knew what I had to do. I was going to have to scrape off ALL of the icing and make all NEW icing. I think the corn syrup was the problem.

Anyway, now I was behind A LOT and after spending several hours I finally had 30 cups of new icing ready to go. Cakes frosted very easily and I was feeling good.

After dinner I did the fun part- the decorating. There was lots of measuring to make sure things were evenly spaced. After everything was decorated, and the plastic dowel rods were cut and inserted I put each tier into a big pan and called it a night. Here is what I had when I went to bed.

Wedding day had arrived. After Abigail's soccer game my BIL Matthew came and watched the kids so Mike & I could take the cake and set it up. We arrived at The Westin in downtown Columbus almost on schedule. We were a bit delayed trying to find a spot to park- ended up feeding a meter.

When we got up to the second floor with everything (borrowed a food cart from the hotel kitchen) the bride & groom were taking pictures together before the wedding. There was also lots of family walking around. I laid out all the supplies and quickly got started stacking the cake.

Everything was going as planned until I went to place the fourth tier on top. I misjudged the height of tier #3 and took off a huge chunk of frosting from the front. I gasped and Mike got nervous. No problem though. It was easily fixed. Mike decided at that point that he didn't want to watch anymore. He couldn't handle the pressure.

Time seemed to go quickly and before I knew it the cake was stacked and I was adding the fresh flowers. I took a few pictures and was out of there with about 5 minutes left on the meter. Here is what the final product looked like: