Collins - The Homemade Wedding Cake

The Homemade Wedding Cake provides you with all the skills and confidence you need to create a show-stopping, personalised cake that will delight family or friends on your Big Day.

Internationally respected cake decorator Natasha Collins leads you seamlessly through the entire process, from designing through to cutting and serving your cake. Detailed step-by-step instructions and photographs make successful, stress-free DIY wedding cakes achievable for everyone.

The Homemade Wedding Cake begins with the fundamentals: baking, trimming, filling and covering, as well as decorating and handling your cake. This is followed by 20 unique wedding cake projects, each representing a distinctive style that will appeal to every tastefrom traditional romantic, to glamorous and glitzy, through to homespun and bohemian. Every project begins with a useful at a glance page that indicates baking and decorating difficulty, as well as timing, cost and logistics.

happy heart makes a happy cake.

Natasha Collins

What Natasha offers with her beautifully hand painted cakes is something genuinely bespoke and different to much of what is out there for brides. Her creations are loved by the Brides team and I am personally one of her biggest fans. Her cakes are expertly designed and I can promise you that having just one slice is simply not an option.

Jade Beer, EDITOR Brides magazine

Natasha Collins, author of The Painted Cake (Murdoch Books, 2014), is a professional cake decorator and owner of the specialist cake-making company Nevie-Pie Cakes in the UK. Her high-profile clients include Selfridges & Co, for whom she created a Christmas cake range, and the BBC. She has presented a special dessert table at 10 Downing Street. Natasha holds cake painting classes across the UK and internationally, and her work has appeared in many wedding and bridal publications.

Contents

WELCOME TO

The Homemade Wedding Cake

An unspecified number of years ago (insert the relevant figure, depending on how old you think I am) I married a lovely man. I can honestly say that it was one of the best days of my life, and a day that I remember with huge affection, albeit a little hazily now through the mists of time.

Back then, things were very different: when I got married the internet hadnt been invented. Well, it existed, but it wasnt as commonplace and easily accessible as it is now; people really only used the web for work, rather than leisure (nobody could afford the dial-up costs to spend time looking at kittens, babies laughing or people falling over). That meant that there were no wedding bloggers, no crafting sites and definitely no Pinterest; nothing that the brides of today take for granted as sources of inspiration

At the time I was working as a textile designer in a London studio, and I was the owner of a (head) strong aesthetic, so I felt that I needed to be heavily involved with creating projects for my big day. I decided that, where possible, I would not be sourcing readymade products for the event; this was most definitely going to be a DIY wedding, with my own stamp on things. So I designed and made the invitations, the order of service and the wedding favours; I created banners to decorate the church and marquee; I roped in friends and family to help with the flower arrangements and to prepare the food for the reception, and that included the cake. Not for me a traditional wedding cake with intricate piping, overloaded with swags of sugar-paste flowers or, heaven forbid, plastic columns! Instead I persuaded my mum to help, and she baked three delicious fruit cakes, which we covered with fondant and then decorated by sprinkling real petals over the top and sides. Fortunately one of my aunts is brilliant at making sugar-paste flowers, so she made a little posy for the top of the cake that tied in with my spring flower theme. It felt perfect, it fitted in well with the feel of the day, it helped us to keep under budget and, most importantly, it tasted great.

My husband was less involved in the planning, it has to be said. He had just one job, which was to pick the music for us leaving the church. He picked a song that had been on the radio a lot when we first metwithout realising that it had since been used as the title track for the film So I Married an Axe Murderer and he couldnt understand why everyone was sniggering as we walked back up the aisle. Despite this (in case you were wondering) we are still happily married and I still consider him to be a lovely man!

Lets fast-forward to the present day, where I am in the full flush of a new career, working as a professional cake artist. One part of my job is teaching classes on how to paint on cakes, and frequently in these classes there are students who are there because they are making their own wedding cakes (or have volunteered to make one for a friend or family member). I am always slightly in awe of their bravery. Even though I did make my own wedding cake, (and when I say I there, I obviously mean my mum) with the benefit of hindsight I realise that I really didnt have a clue about the many potential issues that could have spelled disaster for my cake. When I look back now, after many years experience working in the cake-decorating profession, I pale at the thought of my lack of knowledge: I cant remember if we doweled the cake, and I do wonder about the flowers we used as decoration were they poisonous? (If you were at my wedding and ate some cake I can only apologise for this oversight. I hope you are still in rude health, and Im pretty certain they were fine to eat!)

It was while I was trying to imagine the stress that my students were feeling about creating a cake for someones special day that the idea for this book popped into my head. I began to mull over the thought of a guide for those plucky souls who have decided to make a homemade wedding cake.

This musing intensified when watching a televised baking competition. As the finale, the competitors had to make a showstopping wedding cake in just six hours. Six hours! Now, I have to say even as a professional I would find it very hard (if not impossible) to make something amazing in this time my cakes take me three days to make at least. A couple of the contestants were overambitious with their designs and decoration, which caused them problems, and I thought: if these experienced bakers can fall at this hurdle, how would everybody else cope? A bride (or indeed groom; let me note here that Im not assuming that my own husbands lack of involvement in wedding matters is representative of all men) could be spending hours diligently collating a mood board of their ideas, maybe looking at images of what they imagine to be a handmade wedding cake, and believing that they could achieve something similar. However, as a professional cake maker I recognise that most of these cakes are skillfully made, but designed to have a deliberately rustic appearance.