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.
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.
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 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!
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!
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
‘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
