It’s always a pleasure to work with clients that have a fun & interesting theme for their wedding. And when I received an email from a bride planning a modern Marie Antoinette themed event (think of Sofia Coppola’s rendition) at the historical Loews theater in Jersey City, I just knew we’d get along smashingly! 😀
I ♥ ‘The Love Story” marque.
As the bride was also in the industry (she is a fab makeup artist, and you can find out all about her work here), she was very wise to the fact that the more advance notice you can provide to a boutique vendor like me – the better everything seems to work out!
During our initial design consultation, the bride mentioned that she was interested in the possibility of multiple wedding cakes, as the table the venue provided was 14′ long, and she was afraid that just one small wedding cake would get completely lost. However, with the wedding being on the more intimate side, I knew that breaking down the number of servings needed into multiple cakes would result in some pretty miniscule cakes that would definitely get lost on such a giant table.
So what to do?
Create rental cakes!
I’ve been toying with the idea of rental wedding cakes for a while, and with this particular client being incredibly nice (yes, listen up … it does pay to be nice to your vendors people … we’ll go above and beyond for grateful clients!), I knew that rental cakes would work beautifully to fill the table on a budget. So, in the end, I created one real wedding cake (center) and two faux cakes (left and right) for display on the giant dessert table.
The real wedding cake below was comprised of devil’s food cake, filled with Nutella and raspberry preserves, and frosted in Nutella buttercream. This was the first cake I had made with macarons as decoration & ombre ruffles, and I have to say, I was quite pleased with the end result!
Here’s a closer shot of one of the rental cakes that incorporated pink macarons, a fondant fan and a few gum paste feathers with a black bow on top.
The other faux cake was a one tier cake, in a rough hand painted “polka dot” treatment with a large outline of a flower in the front, accented by a macaron center.
I was so happy to see the following review a few days later from the bride about these cakes on WeddingWire:
“I can’t thank Jen at Sweet Element enough for sharing her amazing talents with us!
I fell in love with a wedding cake design and had come across a bunch of ideas and was searching for someone to bring it all together in one original cake…and not charge us a million dollars for it! I found Sweet Element online and was excited when I read that she will make your design fit within your budget! Its one thing for someone to rip your wedding cake dreams into little parts that you can afford but she really took everything I wanted and gave me a bunch of designs that were all amazing! It was so hard to choose just one!
Jen also made the suggestion of using 2 false cakes to take up space on the huge(14ft long) table we would use as our cake table. Everyone LOVED the 3 cakes and people kept asking when we were going to cut the other two!
I would highly recommend working with Sweet Element for any occasion! Jen was always easy to reach, willing to work with our ideas, worked everything into our budget and her cake was DELICIOUS!”
And lastly … a bit of advice for how to transport a cake on a cake plate!
As the bride wanted to use specific cake plates of her own for presentation, and the real cake had a delicate ruffled base, we came up with an ingenious idea for transport – with the foam support in the photo below. Essentially, I took a cake tier the height of the cake plate, cut out a hole in the center to put the foot of the plate through, cut a piece of no-skid to place atop the foam, and voila!
SweetElement 