Here Comes the Cakes!

Three months ago, a friend, the charming Marketing Manager of Pan Pacific Manila, Kathy Manuel asked me in our casual conversation if I can create her own wedding cake for October 20- she just wants a typical cake for her intimate reception of 40 persons. As for the details of the cake, she is entrusting them all to me. I asked her the color themes of the wedding - 'lavender and yellow'. So I thought this cake will be a breeze! So I said YES! My goal when I accepted my first wedding cake order is to learn how to deliver a cake to the site...my very first delivery of a tiered cake!

In the Philippines, the vogue for wedding cakes is to use fondant. Not my preferred medium for taste but my best choice for elaborate designs using royal icing. I also like caramel cakes so one time I suggested to Kathy maybe she wants a tiered cake filled with hundreds of buttercream roses on a caramel cake...stunning! She said with a tone of assurance that she trusts me- 'ikaw na ang bahala' ...what an uncomplicated client!

This is my first wedding cake! Having a mission to resolve the mystery of transporting a wedding cake is too easy! But this is what this cake is to me. I am anxious of my cakes toppling! I heard from Martha Stewart on TV that there are only two persons to whom one should entrust to transport a cake -one is the person who made it, the other person - the one who made the order.

I didn't have a standard sketch of what her cake would be. But being an avid gardener, It will be lovely to have hundreds of gumpaste flowers on the cake...lavenders, calla lilies, florets of santan. Later she added yellow cymbidiums and lavender iris...the last I am not familiar with so I checked the net for pictures to copy.

I am fond of Joseph Lambeth, an english master cake designer who popularized intricate dimensional overpiping in 1930s. It would be nice (and daring) to create my cakes in this medium. My Lambeth Wedding Cakes - my very first wedding cakes making a grand entrance in the confectionary world! Well... so much for the story.

Kathy's Wedding Cake Ensemble- consists of the Bridal Cake, the Groom's Cake and three satellite cakes. The Bridal and Groom's cake were made to outdo the very first Lambeth Cake I did in the cake design school of Mrs Avelina Florendo and her son Jun Florendo, the CCS Bakeshop and Cake School. Mrs Florendo did a lot of pioneering works in philippine cake design and is an ICES HALL OF Fame inductee for 2005 (translation- one of the world's GREATEST!), That lambeth cake was exhibited in her Mini Philippine cake museum for about a year and is my cake project in her most advanced cake design class, Lambeth 2, a course where I hold the distinction as the first student ever to finish! 'Kathy's Cakes' as the bride wants her cake ensemble to be called consists of a cake topper with 1000 plus gumpaste flowers of five petal flower fillers, lavenders, irises, calla lilies, cattleyas and cymbidiums. Underneath this cake topper is a dimensional basketweave design overpiped 3x using royal icing. Further below, the first two tiers showcases 23 pieces of stunning lattice cushions made also of royal icing! Scattered around the cake are 700+ lavenders and other five petal flowers piped petal by petal using 101s rose petal tubes (not the tubes for the drop flowers!).

For the Groom's cake - I decided to do away with gumpaste flowers and concentrate rather on other Lambeth Continental overpiping techniques - pansy rings, 400 pcs more of the 1 cm five petal royal icing flowers, shells on sides of the cake and lots of overpiped drop strings. For the topper, I placed my 24th lattice cushion on top of a ball as its centerpiece, like a ring bearer's cushion. For a groom's cake which is by standard - sublime (in comparison to the bridal cake), this one is quite ostentatious...sorry ;)!

Well here they are...my lambeth cakes in the months of heavy raining here in the Philippines. In the aftermath of the typhoon 'Juan', four of the front cushions have started to 'weap' due to high humidity and some of the strings were breaking... so I made more 1 cm yellow royal icing flowers to cover the cushion the night before the delivery and voila! - the cakes came out better! Thank God that I finished in time for Kathy's Wedding.

(By the way thanks to the chaueffer who drove the van quite smoothly..the cakes reached the hotel in perfect condition!)