Suzy's wedding cake


The happy couple
This is the engineering face. I sse it often when he is designing and prototyping. He is flattening the red chocolate wrapper to stand in for rose petals on the cake.
Jorj sets up the model
We settled on an off-center spiral, with the bride and groom at the top, a trail of rose petals, and silver leaves between the layers. Dragees were removed early from the design, as some American retailers now recommend they be for decorative purposes only.
Initial design
Keith makes a point about the cake design. He's trying to talk Suze out of so many decorations.
Negotiation

Butter
This is what 15 pounds of butter looks like. Four pounds on the upper shelf, 11 on the lower shelf. I'd wanted Kellers, but only Land O Lakes was available.
Butter
Thank goodnesds for the 1.5 dozen cartons.
10 dozen eggs

A practice cut on the practice cake
Despite the hot and cold spots in the side oven that caused the cake to need two hours to bake, and caused it to collapse in the center. The taste was good.
A successful test
From Suzy and Kieth
Birthday flowers!
The almond cake and vanilla butter cream recipes are from Martha Stewart, in Baking With Julia, by Julia Child and Dorie Greenspan. The espresso chocolate ganache is Marcel Desaulniers's from Death by Chocolate.
A Martha/Marcel recipe

The mark of the Suzy

Research
Foreground to back: sugar being brought to the soft ball stage (239 degrees F); previous batch of buttercream icing, defrosting; turntable supporting two pounds of beaten butter and 6- and 9-inch cake pans; small cake with chocolate filling returning to room temperature to be iced.
Mise en place
Martha lied! You can see the color variations in the icings. The lightest cakes were never frozen: neither the icing nor the iced cakes. The very yellow cake had the icing that had been frozen. The other bottom layer threatened to turn as yellow, but I re-whipped with additional chilled butter, and continually chilled the cake. The middle tones were used for the display cake; the very white and yellow were served.
Loaded
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(c) 2004 Susan J. Talbutt All rights reserved!