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Baking Delights: Baking breads and treats for your family

How to Make Your Own Wedding Cake: Part One

by Marye on April 1st, 2008

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Take a deep breath. I am going to tell you a secret…

Making a wedding cake is not so very hard to do. You can save a TON of money, and end up with a better tasting cake than if you bought it. I promise.

And seriously, have I ever lied to you before?

The end product will be beautiful, especially if you keep it elegantly simple. Personally, I hate the idea of spending 600.00 on cardboard cake slices.

So here is part one of how to make your own wedding cake. How to choose the recipe and what flavor to make it.

First, you need to decide on a recipe. There are two schools of thought here. You can make the cake from a mix (hey, that bakery was probably going to!), adding flavoring to make it better….

or…

You can use a good cake recipe. If you want to make it from scratch I suggest one of the following:

Both are moist enough to handle being moved around and the insertion of dowels, and both are dense enough to support layers.

Using a box mix really isn’t a bad idea, though. They are formulated to come out the same every time…and I will admit to using a boxed mix for my daughter’s wedding cake. I was doing the catering, the cakes, and the flowers, as well as making her wedding dress AND decorating the church, and I did not need the stress of a homemade cake falling apart because I forgot the baking powder.

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This is a Grooms cake my eldest daughter and I made for a close friend.

If you decide to use a box mix then consider adding the following flavorings per box:

1 tsp vanilla + 1/2 tsp almond

1 tbs rose + 1 tsp vanilla

1 tsp lemon + 1 tsp vanilla

1 tsp banana + 1 tsp vanilla + 1/2 tsp walnut

1 tbs rose + 1 tsp almond

or use your favorite tea as the water in the recipe (if you are making a white cake and use tea, your cake will not be white)

Next decide on filling flavors. Depending on how many tiers and layers you have you can do many different combinations…some of my favorites are:

  • Irish Cream
  • lemon curd
  • orange curd
  • rio star grapefruit curd
  • lime curd
  • raspberry
  • coconut
  • chai buttercream
  • coffee buttercream
  • chocolate ganache
  • vanilla bean buttercream
  • oreo buttercream

You can add to the flavor further by brushing with flavored syrups. What about an orange cake, brushed with a lavender syrup?

Or some other flavors that might be interesting are:

chai- ginger

milk chocolate- raspberry

lemon-blueberry

mango-coconut

If you can imagine the flavor you can create it in your cake very easily. When I did my daughter’s wedding we did the wedding cake in an intense vanilla with Bailey’s filling. The grooms cake was dark chocolate, with ganache filling and bittersweet frosting. Check out all the flavorings at Candyland Crafts to get an idea of what I am saying about the number of flavors available. And any flavor can be added easily to a boxed mix to change it totally and create a uniquely flavored cake, just for you.

You will need several boxes of cake mix, or recipes of batter. Wilton has an awesome chart here that tells you how many cups of mix you will need for each type and size of pan. It also gives you the servings you can expect to get from each size. One you know how many servings you will need you can figure how big to make your cake. I suggest you figure it 10% more than you need because it is better to have too much than too little.

When Erin was married I picked up boxed mix on sale for 89 cents a box. It took twelve boxes to make the cake to feed 125 people, as I recall. $10.68 cents for the cake itself.

You think about the flavor combo you want, and tomorrow we will talk about tiers, stacks and shapes.

Images: Personal Collection, Marye Audet (c)2008 Aprons Strings and Simmering Things

Used by permission

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POSTED IN: Cakes, Inspiration, Tips and Techniques, Tutorials and Basics

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