Wedding Cake Wednesday: Art Deco Old Hollywood Glamour

Good morning, you gorgeous lot! I have such a treat for you today.

It is with no small amount of pride that I share with you the Wedding Cake that I designed for Heather and Pete.

Because this gorgeous couple have been my friends for at least four or five years now, they gave me a fairly free hand to design the cake as I imagined it for them. We sat down for a consultation (which always feels very businesslike and descends into being very giggly with friends, when my ‘work’ head goes on!) in my conservatory over cups of tea and sore heads from the night before spent drinking cocktails in Bears & Tales.

From our consultation, I got that whilst Heather was looking for something fairly modern, Pete was keen to have a traditional white Wedding Cake with at least one traditional fruit cake tier. Fruit cakes are rare in modern Wedding Cakes and I make very few of them these days as people tend to prefer lighter sponge tiers in flavours such as Lemon Drizzle and Chocolate Mud Cake.

Thankfully, it is no problem at all to please everyone in one cake. This is what I came up with.

It is rare that a cake design on paper translates perfectly into icing (if an element of the design doesn’t look 100% to me in the real thing, I will change it) but this one just worked like a dream.

The theme for the day was to be old Hollywood glamour, tying in the couple’s love of vintage styling from the 1920s – 1940s. I’d describe them as ‘retro-eclectic’, taking the most wonderful elements of decades of fashion and culture and combining them with personal twists. The wedding was to be vintage-inspired but not a strict re-enactment of any one era – it was going to be a fun wedding as the Father of the Bride’s Rolling Stone’s tribute band were already booked to play it! I couldn’t wait!

I created an Art Deco inspired sunburst motif in panels of white sugar lace, trimmed with piped and hand-painted pearls. Painting piped pearls with an edible pearlescent lustre brings them sparkling to life. This design detail enabled me to create a cake with all the deco detailing that Heather wanted with the white on white classic feel that Pete wanted.

Compromise doesn’t have to be a dirty word. Sometimes it’s these decisions that inspire true creativity and leave you with something rather wonderful. The handmade white sugar roses scream classic Wedding Cake but the design is all created in modern techniques.

One of my personal favourite touches of this design was the art deco fan topper that I created to crown the cake. I cut panels from white sugar florist paste and covered them with white sugar lace and the pearl trim.

The caged pearls around the top tier of the cake were based on a royal icing technique that I learnt with Ceri DD Griffiths at Squires Kitchen School. This is truly a modern interpretation of a classic technique.

This cake was a joy to design and to make. Congratulations to Mr and Mrs Emery.

Special thanks to Neil Walker at www.neilwalkerphotography.co.uk for the stunning cake photos.

Thanks to Becky Wensley for the amazing featured shot in this post! It’s so romantic, I couldn’t resist using it. 

If you are planning a 2017 wedding, now is the time to get in touch and book your Wedding Cake consultation. Let’s get together, eat cake, and design your cake over the cold months – we all need something delicious to look forward to at this time of year and I’ll feed you full of cake. Full details of my Bespoke Wedding Cake Service can be found by clicking here.

Stay gorgeous!

Cxx