CRUMB COAT WEDDING CAKE HOW TO

You want to plan for 20 extra slices, to play it safe. If you’re doweling the cake so it can be stacked, each of those dowels will cost you a slice or so. Print a guide out and bring it, explain it, and save yourself a lot of mental distress because the alternative is that slices come out too big, nobody finishes them, and then there’s not enough cake, adding insult to injury. Two really key things, though: One, don’t assume anyone cutting the cake knows how wedding cakes are supposed to be cut, no matter how many weddings have been hosted there. So, you get a lot more servings per cake. When cut into 1″ by 2″ slices (“wedding cut”), it’s not ungenerous it’s, in fact, perfect. A wedding cake tier or is usually much taller, often 4″ to 4.5″” (but seriously, 4″ is really perfect and 5″ won’t fit on a lot of dessert plates). A 2-inch by 2-inch slice - aka “party cut” - is generous. Imagine the grid/cutting guide from the top of the cake, looking down. Regular layer cakes (“party cakes”) are shorter, usually 3 inches tall with frosting and filling. You’ll see terms like Wedding Cut and Party Cut and be perplexed, so let me break it down for you. Take a look at cake serving guides online ( Wilton has some good ones). How many guests will the cake need to serve? Does the couple want to take the top tier home for their anniversary cake? Sort these first.

Because you’re only going to do it once and then it will be out of your system - just like me (wink).Ģ. Because (once your kitchen has recovered) you’ll admit that it’s more fun than buying a place setting of china. There are lots of reasons to do it anyway: To see the shock and surprise and delight on people’s faces when they bite into a cake that actually tastes like a dream.

There hasn’t been a single Wedding Cake Week in which I haven’t fallen behind in every other area of my life. Ovens break, stand mixers break - it’s all happened to me. On this third one, I realized the cake was shrinking more than I’d expected at larger sizes (don’t worry, I’ve since fixed the recipe), meaning that once trimmed my 12-inch tier was more like 10-inch and… woefully short on servings, leading to a bonus day of baking 14-inch layers and just so many (fine, three) gray hairs. I curdled a dozen-egg batch of custard on my second wedding cake (and yes, of course I didn’t have a dozen eggs to spare). Things happen that if you were a baker at a bakery who did this all day, would be a small inconvenience but at home can be utterly derailing. Each layer of a 12-inch cake may fill a 5-quart KitchenAid bowl, so you’ll make each as a separate cake recipe. As soon as the headcount is over 80 people, you’re likely looking at a tier that’s 14 inches, which is larger than small city ovens can fit, and the absolute outer limit of the Whirlpool masterpiece my building has graced my kitchen with. It is a logistical challenge that few home kitchens have been designed to accommodate, let alone city kitchens with a single counter, small oven and fridge. Baking a cake to feed an entire wedding reception is a whole other thing. Here’s the thing: Baking a delicious cake for people you love is not hard it’s very doable and lovely and even feels good.

CRUMB COAT WEDDING CAKE HOW TO

How to | Cake Details | Recipes | Buttercream Flower Gardenġ. Three wedding cakes in, I’ve learned a lot of stuff that doesn’t fall in your usual wedding cake baking guide and since I’m definitely never making another wedding cake (“I mean it this time!” I say with such thin resolve it’s clear even I don’t buy it anymore), I think we should start here. But a mere year and a half later, another fabulous friend got engaged to another wonderful guy and that brings us up to a couple weeks ago: wedding cake three. However, I waited completely until the last minute to start it and while we loved it in the end, the absolutely-my-fault stress/chaos of the project definitely set the clock back on me making another wedding cake for at least another nine years. At the end of this fun but exhausting endeavor, I declared the accounting of terrible and wonderful wedding cakes in the universe to be infinitesimally more in balance and making wedding cakes to be “completely out of my system.” That lasted about nine years, when one of my oldest and favorite-est friends got married in 2018. “You’re crazy.” “It’s too much work.” “Do you want to spend your Special Day covered in frosting?” And so I relented and our wedding cake tasted like processed awfulness and it bothered me so much that I volunteered to make the wedding cake for friends a few years later, in 2008. In the months before my wedding, I periodically suggested I might like to make our wedding cake (because most giant wedding cakes are terrible) and was swiftly shot down by everyone who heard it.

Crumb coat wedding cake