Bespoke Wedding Cakes – Creating a Lace and Hand Painted Wedding Cake

Creating a Bespoke Lace and Hand Painted Wedding Cake for Rachel and Chris’s Lancashire Wedding.

Rachel and Chris had an amazing wedding at Brockholes Nature Reserve in Lancashire. Rachel was very hands on and designed fabrics and stationery for their wedding. She wanted to incorporate her designs and elements of her wedding dress into her lace and  hand painted wedding cake.

Stationery and wedding dress
Rachel’s beautiful dress and the couple’s stationery

The Wedding Consultation

Their wedding consultation was so enjoyable. We began by looking at her inspiration pictures, not forgetting pictures of her dress! I love wedding dresses and find them so inspirational for wedding cake design. We decided that the designs on the fabrics and stationery would look amazing hand painted on their cake. Her dress had beautiful heavy lace embroidery panels and buttons down the back. Both of these elements were perfect for adding to the cake. We chatted, they ate lots of cake! whilst I sketched and refined the cake design.  We had to successfully marry the rustic fabrics and venue styling with the formality of Rachel’s dress. I love a challenge like this and I think the end result was perfect. You can read more about wedding consultations here.

Wedding dress
Rachel’s mikado silk wedding dress
Venue styling
Wonderful rustic wedding with bunting
Bride and groom and bridesmaids with flowers
wedding cake inspiration from the wedding flowers

Creating the Lace and Hand Painted Design

In the days running up to Rachel and Chris’s wedding I created their cake.  The tiers were freshly baked, filled and then coated in a generous layer of luxurious chocolate ganache made with Belgian chocolate. This provided the perfect base for the luxury white sugar paste icing.  I was then ready for Royal icing and painting which is my absolute favourite thing to do. I find it so exciting seeing the design come to life because my passion is to create the cake you have been dreaming of.

Hand Painting

Using edible dust colours and careful freehand painting I created the watercolour effect from the stationery and fabrics . It’s just like painting on a canvas meaning the possibilities are endless! How exciting is that? The hand painting took some time to look just as I wanted to but by adding layers of dusts I was finally happy.

Hand painting on wedding cake
Edible hand painted watercolour effect

Hand piped royal icing

Then over to the Royal icing, super exciting! I enlarged images of the lace embroidery on Rachel’s beautiful wedding dress so that I could  draw it and transfer the design to the cake. Then the hand piping could begin. I cannot tell you how much I enjoy hand piping. It is amazing to see the design slowly emerge and even if I do say so myself the end result is exquisite. Many hours go into creating a royal iced design but every minute is worth it!

Hand piped royal icing lace
Hand piped royal icing lace
Royal icing lace and sugar buttons
Hand piped royal icing lace and sugar buttons

One touch we mustn’t forget is Rachel ad Chris’s little look a likes in the form of personalised sugar peg dolls. What a fantastic bride and groom topper!

Bride and groom peg doll topper
Cute peg doll style sugar bride and groom topper
Hand painted and royal iced lace wedding cake
Completed cake with its sugar personalised peg doll style bride and groom topper

And there we are the completed wedding cake! Beautiful and marrying perfectly the rustic and formal elements of Rachel and Chris’s wedding. I was happy and most importantly they were happy x

Thank you photograph from bride and groom
How fantastic is this? Bride and groom thank you card

‘we just wanted to say thank you for making us the most perfect wedding cake! It was absolutely beautiful, how you managed to hand paint the design so beautifully is beyond me! Not only did it look great it tasted amazing too, we couldn’t of asked for anything more. Thank you so much for being part of out special day! Love from Chris and Rachel xxx’

 

 

VENUE Brockholes Nature Reserve

PHOTOGRAPHER Kate McCarthy Photography

 

 

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