Last Sunday was Nastya’s wedding. (Nastya was our second au pair. She watched Ashley from the time she was 22 months and until Katelyn was born, after which she moved to NYC to study.)
I volunteered to put my cake making skills to a test and bake her and Danny a wedding cake! She had about 50 invitees, so the cake would have to be the largest I’ve ever made. Luckily for me, my friend Nadia (yes her name is same as mine) is also into cakes and graciously offered to help me with this project. So, here’s how it went down..
We decided on a two tier cake, 14” round on the bottom and a 10”round cake for second tier. I started by baking trial run cakes from recipes and making frostings early in the week to try to figure out the flavor combination.
On Friday, Nadia came over and we had a tasting. The winner was a lemon cake with raspberry jam filling and whipped vanilla butter cream icing. Mike, Indira, Dan and Nadia all agreed that this was delicious, however Mike, who’s not a fruity kind of guy, said that he wanted a chocolate cake, so we decided to make lemon-raspberry be the bottom tier and chocolate cake with chocolate ganache and fresh strawberries for the top tier.
The plan was to decorate the cake with daffodils to match Nastya’s flower bouquet. I whipped up royal icing in different colors, and Nadia made some beautiful daffodils, just like we learned in our cake decorating class in February. We also make some little violets, but later decided not to use them. I baked the three bottom tier cakes Friday night, while Nadia worked on the flowers.
Saturday, as soon we were back from Ashley’s gymnastics I started baking the three chocolate layers for the top tier. Everything was going smoothly. Nadia came over after lunch, I assembled and frosted the bottom layer, Nadia decorated it with a shell border. We inserted the dowels for top tier support and around 4 o’clock we had the chocolate cake cooled, filled with ganache and strawberries. It was frosted with buttercream icing and was set to chill in the fridge. It looked like we were on track to be done with everything by 5pm. No sooner than I mentioned that we were making good progress we had a disaster…
When it was time to start smoothing out the icing on the chocolate cake we noticed that we had a land slide on one side. The weight of the icing was pulling down a big chunk of the cake and there was no way to save it. We just sat there and watched it. Nadia tried to save the cake by removing the chuck that was falling off, and then sticking it back on with the help of a lot of icing. There was no way this cake could go on top of the bottom tier. We made a decision to bake two 10” lemon cake layers for the top tier. Nadia had a hard stop at 7pm, so we scrambled to get as much done as possible, but she had to leave before the 2nd layer was finished baking. Nadia promised to make time Sunday morning (the day of the wedding) to come back to help decorate the cake.
Saturday night, I finished baking and making frosting and I ran out looking for shoes for the kids to go with their dresses, and while out shopping I was happy to hear from Nadia, who called to tell me that their Saturday night plans were cancelled and she could come back to help me with the cake! At 10pm Nadia was back in my kitchen! Yay! I frosted the top tier, and we gently lowered it on top of the bottom one. Nadia decorated it with more shell borders and we spent some time arranging the daffodils on the sides and top of the cake. The cake came out gorgeous! I can’t be more proud of us, it weighted a lot but was solid, tasty and very good looking :)
Next we revisited the chocolate cake with was still in my fridge awaiting its destiny. The frosting has hardened and it looked like it may be possible to bring it back, however the question still remained if it would survive the car drive to Brooklyn. Nadia smoothed out the cake, and decorated the top with some buttercream roses and sweet pea flowers. It was after 1am on Saturday night when we finally were done! Both cakes came out looking good after all!
The next challenge was to make sure we can transport the cakes and not damage them on our one hour ride into Brooklyn. The two tier cake we loaded into a 18”x18”x16” cardboard box from Lowes, while the chocolate cake I covered with a dome from my cake carrier. Mike drove extra careful, and I carried them into the church very slowly to make sure I don’t trip on anything. Both cakes made it to the wedding in perfect condition!! :)
The wedding ceremony and reception were very nice and simple. Ashley was very excited to go, since this was her first wedding ever. She couldn’t wait for Danny to kiss Nastya at the end, and was very excited about how beautiful Nastya looked. Ashley also made a friend with the Pastor’s daughter, so the two of them had a blast playing during the reception. Katelyn was also a very good girl, she behaved during the church part, and then tagged along with Ashley.
Then it was time to cut the cake, I served the cake, and couldn’t slice it fast enough. The cake got a lot of compliments both on how it looked as well as on the taste. The chocolate cake was all gone as well as half of the lemon raspberry cake. Here are some pictures from the wedding:
It was another amazing weekend - dressing up and going out as a family to a wedding, as well as a super satisfying experience making a wedding cake! It was really fun to work with Nadia on this project! I hope we can do more projects like this together again soon :)
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