Snowflake Winter Wedding Cake

Snowflake Winter Wedding Cake

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There comes a point in every former cake artist’s life, where you’re sitting on literally thousands of photos from your previous career, and start getting wrapped up in nostalgia.

Well, I’m assuming as much, anyway.

As my cake career mostly happened before the height of social media - and definitely before Pinterest & Instagram! - most of my photos have been languishing away in archived folders on our backup servers, never having seen the light of... well, anyone else’s monitors!

No, back in the day, I’d post a single photo of a cake to my website. Very small res photos, just one overall, straightforward view of each cake, as a cataloging photo.

The shame here is that my husband actually took many photos of most of the cakes I made, back in the day.

I have a lot of really gorgeous detail shots, artistic angles of full cakes, etc.

So, I’d like to take a walk down memory lane, share some of that photography, and talk about how the cakes were made!

Snowflake Wedding Cake

This Snowflake themed wedding cake was always one of my favourites, both in the actual execution, and as far as the photography went:

It was a HUGE departure from my normal style of cake, which tended to involve a lot of fondant.

Having the opportunity to do piped icing of any kind ended up being kind of a rare treat!

The base cake here was covered in fondant, though it didn’t NEED to be. You could just as easily make this cake entirely based in buttercream (Swiss Meringue Buttercream, ideally - it was always my favourite!), should you so desire.

The fun thing about this wedding cake was that the vast majority of the work could be done in advance of the normal cake decorating time line.

The snowflakes are all piped out of royal icing, and allowed to fully harden.

Once they’re hard, these snowflakes can be VERY GENTLY transferred to a protective, airtight container, and put aside until it’s go time.

That was a nice change from the rush to do all of the decorating the day before - or day of - a wedding or special event.

Instead, all that needs to be done for this one is to frost and/or fondant the base layers, and pipe out the lacy design on top of each layer.

Then, the royal icing snowflakes are affixed to the cake with more royal icing.
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I would do this final decoration step at the venue, because I am NOT gutsy enough to transport the cake in this state!

Lacy Wedding Cake Design

In this case, I piped the top surface / edge of each layer with a Cornelli lace design, randomly extending slightly down the sides of the cake, to be evocative of icicles.

Additionally, I piped random half snowflakes onto the base of each layer, forming an interesting border.

Finally, I piped a basic beaded border at the very base of each layer, to tie it all together.

Looking Back on this Winter Wedding Cake

While I love the cake to this day, I’ve got to say... looking back on the super close detail photos makes me shudder a bit, now.

This was very early in my cake decorating career, and I was DEFINITELY not as practiced at piping as I was with fondant work.

This was the second time I'd made this cake - we didn't get great photos of the first one, so I made a second as a styrofoam "dummy" cake.

I'm glad I did... though I'm kicking myself for using a cardboard circle to extend the diameter of the acrylic cake base underneath, rather than either waiting for a larger one to be returned, or asking my husband to make another large one.

Fondant work was fairly close to working with fabric, after all. Having spent many years as a Fashion & Costume Designer before my transition to cake... I definitely preferred fondant to piping, overall.

So, I see the mistakes, now. I see all of the little peaks that should have been patted down before the frosting dried, the changes in pressure that came from hesitation, etc.

Even so, it was a stunning cake - and dropped everyone’s jaws at the time.

I doubt I’ll ever make another wedding cake, but some day... some day I may remake this as a “dummy” cake, just to see how it would look, now.