Vow Renewal

Some good friends of ours recently renewed their vows and asked me to make the cake for their reception/going away party.  Other than telling me which flavors they wanted and what colors the decorations were, they left the design up to me.  Since they were getting ready to leave Maui, I decided a tropical themed cake was a must. I headed to my favorite website, CakeCentral, to look for some design inspiration. I took some ideas from a few different cakes and came up with an idea of what I wanted; visions of plumeria, bamboo and teal/aqua filled my mind. 

After the baking and trimming were done, I filled the cakes:

Then it was time to start frosting.  I forgot to use my cake icer tip, so icing the sides was more difficult than it needed to be, but I still got it all covered.

Notice how I made sure the frosting went all the way to the edge of the cake board, doing this gives you a guide when you use a spatula or other tool to smooth the sides. The next picture shows one of my favorite icing tools, the Wilton Baker's Blade, this blade is great for smoothing the sides of a cake.

Unfortunately, the odds were stacked against me when I started trying to smooth the cake. I had forgotten that the sun beats on my kitchen wall all morning making it super hot and that the AC doesn't work all that well in there.  I iced and scraped and smoothed and re-iced and re-scraped and re-smoothed over and over for about an hour before I finally decided this cake was never going to be smooth.  I decided I'd go for the textured look and just say it was supposed to "represent the ocean"! :)  You can totally do that with art, right?  Haha!

I had some other tricks up my sleeve, so I wasn't too worried about the texture.  (My husband would probably disagree since I asked him about the texture until the very minute we actually got to the party!) Remember when I said that my visions included plumeria and bamboo?  Well, these were all handmade.  I sculpted plumeria out of gum paste and bamboo out of fondant.

This was my first attempt at the gum paste plumeria and I learned some tricks in the process, but overall they turned out well.

Even though it wasn't exactly what I had originally pictured, I think the cake turned out nicely; everyone at the party loved it and there were only a few pieces left when the night was over!