My first wedding cake

My little brother got married a few weeks ago. Back when they first set the date his fiance asked if I would make their wedding cake. I was honored that they even asked me to think about making the cake for them. I don't have any pictures of the inside of it but it was a white cake with a strawberry whipped cream filling that I sort of threw together. (My original plan was to make a strawberry filling-almost like a compote-but it was too loose. So I whipped some cream and added my strawberry simple syrup with some macerated whole strawberries)

I knew going in to it that baking a wedding cake would be stressful so I took the Friday before the wedding off from my normal job to dedicate to the cake making. I had a couple of mini-meltdowns when things weren't going the way that I wanted to but thankfully my good friend Kate was there to talk me down and cheer me on.

This is the only picture that I was able to get-from my iPhone no less-of the cake. My brother hasn't gotten the prints/disc from the photographer so instead of waiting on him I decided to go ahead and post the one that I had.

A tale of the cake with multiple personalities...

This is a cake. However, it's not just any ordinary cake. This cake has a special story to tell. There are multiple sides to this story. Let me share them with you:

This is the other side of the story.

How did this come to pass? Well, it's like this. My younger brother will be getting married in October. His fiance asked if I'd be willing to make their wedding cake. I, of course, said that I'd love to make the cake. I'm honored that they would even consider having me make their cake because I'm certainly not a professional baker. But, on the other hand I'm terrified. It's not like this is a birthday cake that no one will remember in the future. A wedding cake is a very big deal.

I told my sister-in-law-to-be that I'd make a couple of practice cakes, that way she could get a feel for what it will actually look like before hand. Originally she had told me that she wanted a round cake decorated in lavender. Then last week she told me that she had changed her mind and that she wanted it to be white on white. I decided that for the first practice cake I'd decorate the cake both ways so that she could decide which style/color she liked best.

That's the end of the story, folks. In an effort to make life a little easier I combined the two ideas to have a side by side comparison. Now, you know how we came to have the cake with multiple personalities.