For auld lang syne

My dear friends Kirsty and Alistair got married at Rowardennan Lodge on Loch Lomond.

The inspiration for the cake was actually an old railway poster of Loch Lomond, which they printed in their order of service.

I took the colours from the poster and used them in stripes on the cake, with different tiers representing different areas – sky, mountains, woods, water. My pasta roller came in very handy for the stripes.

Topped with a model of the bride and groom. I had to rather guess at the bride’s dress, as she hadn’t finished making it a week before the wedding!

(Cake’s gone a wee bit shiny in the last picture – that’s the danger of plastic marquees.)

It was a great day. I even went for a dip in the loch the morning after. Congratulations you two!

My friends Ginny and Gavin got hitched in Edinburgh with a very bijou wedding for just 10 guests. I was one of the lucky few. We had dinner over the road from the registry office then crossed the road again to the pub for some band karaoke.

Such a neat and tidy wedding needed a dinky cake. Or 10 of them. One for each guest.
I still made them too big – we only managed two between all of us.

Apparently these are called ‘Elopement Cakes’. I made them in a rainbow of sugarpaste and tried lots of different piping techniques. Each has a flower with a G in the middle.

My old next door neighbour Lucy Wallace married Jon Alwen at a three day Wedding Fest extravaganza in a field in Somersest. It was brilliant fun – lots of big tents and hay bales.

Our whole family was involved in wedding preparations. My sister Meg did the flowers, my mum altered the dress and my little sister Sally was chief bridesmaid. Dad seemed to do a lot of general driving around. Which left me with the invitations, and of course, the cake.

Lucy and Jon met on a film shoot in the Amazon and are both intrepid world travellers, so wanted a cake to reflect this. Suitcases with vintage labels seemed the way to go, but I thought they needed something extra and made a globe too.

The four tiers were chocolate, carrot, coconut and lemon sponge. Each of the stickers represented one of the places they had visited and was also one of the table names. Deepest darkest peru (black letters spelling peru on a black background) was my favourite.

Getting the whole cake down to Somerset from Glasgow was a bit stressful! The train guard eventually took pity on me after telling me off for transporting a wedding cake, and found me some space for it.

The globe was made with a spherical cake mould. I really wanted to make it spin, but thought this was perhaps a tad overambitious. I made a support from modelling clay and card, but I didn’t make the base quite wide enough, so it was a bit wobbly. This,  combined with the fact that the table, not to say, the field on which the the floor was set, wasn’t flat, meant it all leaned at rather an alarming angle!

Sure enough, I came back after setting the cake up to find the globe had taken a nose dive off the table. Surprisingly it was largely undamaged, but I decided I’d repair the top of the cake and keep the globe safely to one side. Phew!

I didn’t quite get away with it, as the groom made a joke about the ’5 second rule’ in his speech. But it all tasted good, which is the main thing with cake, I think.

I had a manic week making two wedding cakes recently, both with a bit of a map theme.

The first was a classic affair; three tiers of fruit cake iced in white. It featured a design based on the bride’s dress, with embroidered flowers and pearl details. Instead of ribbons around each tier, I cut up a map into strips, reflecting the theme of their invitations.

Thank you to Sorrel for delivering the cake for me – it was seriously heavy.

Hope you guys had a great honeymoon!