From Sketch to Reality - Making Dreams Come True!

Weddings

The secrets of our wedding cake design process revealed

We have always wanted to find a way to share our wedding cake design process with you and our blog is the perfect place! So much love, thought and development time and teamwork goes into creating a bespoke wedding cake and it's such a fun process to blog about!

the most important question

When we're designing a bespoke wedding cake for a couple, each journey is different, as you might very well imagine. There are so many sources of inspiration, but the first and most important question for us is always the same: how can we design a cake that truly echoes the couples relationship and reflects their characters as individuals? I can't wait to chat more about this in future posts, but this time we want to give you a glimpse of the process behind designing from scratch for a collection of new wedding cake designs.

show time

Each February and October is Wedding Show time! So in the months and weeks before, it's design studio madness as we bounce around all the crazy ideas we've been storing up over the past wedding season – new icing texture techniques we've been developing, different ways of making wafer paper flowers we've been experimenting with, novel ways with buttercream that we've been dreaming of and new colour palettes we are itching to be let loose with!

let's get messy

It's the most intensively creative time of year and we often get ridiculously over excited about the opportunities it brings. The cake studio becomes a playroom – all our favourite toys in one place and it's time to get experimental in a happy haze of sugary bliss!

sketch it up

Team meeting time! We pitch our ideas, make a list of all our must-have design elements THEN...and this is key... take a step back to revisit our our overall vision for the collection. It's so tempting to get carried away on a wave of delight over the little details, but over years of trail and error, we've realised that keeping the overall picture in view makes for a more integrated and successful collection. Time to pull out the watercolour paper, pencils and always an eraser too - just in case!

all hands to the piping bag

Now the new range is down on paper, it's a race back into the kitchen for the longest rolling pin and straightest palette knife and time to tone the triceps as tiers after tiers of show cakes appear at the icing section ready for fondant. Then comes the more intricate, but fun job of creating the 'mes en plas' (or decorations) and the kitchen is a flurry with wafer paper, florist wire and petal paste.

the best bit of all

When the show cakes are iced and the 'mis en plas' is made, well, it's our favourite time of all - putting it all together! This is when the magic happens and the designs that have been confined to two dimensions unfurl into reality. There are always a few surprises, some things that don't quite go to plan, but that's the beauty of it. The alchemy of bringing a vision into a reality is the one of the most rewarding treats there could be. Browse our Wedding Cakes page if you're hungry for more cake visuals!

Gym kit on

Don your yoga pants, it's work-out time as we load up the cake vans on show set-up day! Exhibition centres and wedding venues aren't known for their handy loading bays and hauling (delicately does-it) 20-30 multi-tiered wedding cakes to an exhibition stand (usually in the pouring rain) is not for the weedy legged! But perhaps it helps to off-set a few months of break-time 'sampling' of cake off-cuts, let's look on the up-side :)

that's what its all about

And now for the day of the show, it's time to meet the couples, hear their romantic stories, feel the love and talk cake! (Oh and hand out a few wee samples of course.) Seeing our couples excitement and chatting through ideas for their dream cake is the reason we're all here and it's what we love the most!

missing you

Can you tell how much we're missing being in the cake kitchen during lockdown? So, so much! And every day we think of the couples who had to postpone their wedding dates and hope they are coping ok. We cannot wait to open our doors and welcome our customers again, but 'till then we shall keep calm and keep blogging! In the coming weeks, we'll be chatting more about the very important matter of baking and introduce you to our favourite wedding cake flavours and fillings. We'll also take you through the process of designing your bespoke wedding cake with some gorgeous case studies of couple's creative journeys, chat about the options for wedding favours and sweetie tables and take you behind the scenes to look at how some of our some favourite wedding cake designs were created! We can't wait x