I was asked by very good friends to make their wedding cake a couple of months ago. I was super excited with the prospect of taking this new challenge on. What I was not expecting was the planning it took to get it done. I had a mental picture of what I wanted the cake to look like, but being a perfectionist at heart created a whole different array of problems.

Finding the cake recipe was super easy, I was able to go to Martha Stewart’s website and find an amazing recipe for marble cake, which worked great. Coming up with the filling idea was not complicated either, I purchased raspberry preserves and made a ganache with dark chocolate and nutella. The problem was leaving the ganache in the fridge back home and realizing it the day before the wedding. Have I mentioned yet that the wedding was taking place 8 hours away from me?  Yeah, maybe I should have started with that tidbit of info. Thank goodness that there are Walmart’s everywhere.

I made sure to freeze the cakes ahead of time, and even got an insulated bag to place them in. Hyperventilating when I was trying to get them in the mini fridge at the hotel was not my finest moment.

Icing was a whole different animal. I had considered making it, but wasn’t convinced the buttercream would travel well even if frozen beforehand. I even considered hauling my KitchenAid  mixer and making it there, but gave up on that idea fairly quickly. I finally gave up on the notion of homemade buttercream and went the Wilton way, it was a great decision.

When I was making the peony about a month before the wedding, I forgot to consider that a single flower would have looked a bit bland, and it wasn’t until 2 days before I was supposed to leave that I thought of leaves or even little accents. Thank goodness for 2 things: I had enough sugar paste at home and Google search is a lifesaver. Let me tell you, free-styling leave cutouts is a pain, I have come to appreciate the art form.

In the end, it took, an insulated bag and a giant reusable bag full of utensils and materials to get this cake done. One thing that really helped me was coming up with a list of all the utensils and tools I would need, to help me pack. If only I had added the ganache to it, oh well!

Assembling the cake took less time that I had calculated. I trimmed the cakes, split the layers, filled them, crumb iced and did second coat in about 2 hours total. I was really happy with the finished product, and the bride and groom really liked it as well, so YAY!

I would love to hear your comments, also, do you have any tricks for traveling long distances with cakes?