Today was wedding cake assembly day.
Adrienne started off the day by making the strawberry mousse for the filling. We wanted to wait until the day of so it would still be as fresh as possible for tomorrow. After that was finished and chilling, we started to assemble the cakes.
We were concerned with the fact that the filling on this cake is mousse and the middle and top tier combined would weight quite a bit and cause the mousse to squish out the sides of the bottom tier. After talking it over with Kacean, she told us we needed to pipe a ring of a good thick Italian butter cream around the outside and then fill the inside with the mousse. That would be enough to hold it in. **Note from after the wedding: The butter cream trick worked and the mousse stayed in the cake after it was all assembled!!**
Here is Adrienne filling the bottom tier with mousse and Megan is watching in the background. (She's making her own wedding cake this summer and was trying to learn as many tricks as possible before then):
After the tier was assembled I started frosting them with the butter cream while Adrienne started filling the second tier.
Because the second tier was so large, we would need some hefty dowels in the center to hold it up. Rex helped us out with that part. :) I have to say, it was super weird bringing a hand saw to school that day in my backpack. . .
After they were all assembled and covered in butter cream we were ready to start covering them in fondant.
The bottom tier was 14" in diameter and we needed a space large enough to roll out the fondant. This is the only counter space we had and it's pretty tall, so Adrienne had to stand on a crate to get it rolled out.
We were able to cover the top tier okay with no problems and the board the cake was going to sit on. After that point, we started to have some issues. The fondant we were working with had been made about a month ago and frozen. To help it become more elastic-ee (is that a word??) we put it back into the mixer and added extra glycerin. In that process, I guess we over mixed it and that caused more problems. The fondant was super crumbly and wouldn't hold together like it was supposed to. We kept tearing it when we tried to pick it up. We tried to cover the middle tier and it was so large and so tall, and the fondant was rolled out so big that when we tried to cover it, it just ripped and fell right off the cake. To solve this problem, we ended up just making a fresh batch and putting it on the cake fresh instead of chilling it overnight and letting it set up. We covered the cake and let it chill for a few minutes after it was already covered. That was so much easier than our other options. The fondant rolled out a lot thinner (which was super helpful for this large cake) and was a lot more elastic-ee. :)Then came our next challenge. We had to cover the 14" tier. Rex convinced us to try with our old fondant so we didn't have as much waste and it would save some time. It was so awful, Adrienne and I both thought that there was no way it would turn out. The fondant cracked right in half and so we had a huge seam in the middle of the cake. We also had huge chunks missing and cracks all over the entire thing. It seemed completely hopeless. Rex could see the stress, anxiety and doubt in our faces and told us to just wait a minute. He doctored up one side of the fondant for a few minutes and turned it around to show us and in some spots, you almost couldn't tell what we went through. We ended up covering everything with shortening and powdered sugar/cornstarch mix and some how, miraculously we ended up saving that tier without making a fresh batch of fondant. In the end when you looked at the cake, no one would have even the slightest clue what we went through on that tier. You almost couldn't tell it was there...
Here is the bottom tier when we started out before we fixed it. This is what Adrienne and I saw and thought that there was absolutely zero hope saving:
Here is the bottom tier, about halfway through being doctored by Dr. Rex.
Here are all three of our tiers ready to be set up tomorrow. We were super happy with how they turned out, especially after we had so many issues with the fondant.
At the end of our super long day (Adrienne was there for 11 hours, I was there for 9 1/2) we started to clean up and had to come up with a place to store the cake overnight where people would leave it alone. One of our walk-ins was broken and no in use, so we put it in the walk-in and locked it up so no one could go in there.
That was it for our day, we headed home to get some sleep so we could come back and load it all up and take it to Salt Lake.
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