The story of a wedding cake (part 1)

This past summer, it seemed like all of my friends were getting married, and I was invited to four weddings (but fortunately no funeral).

For one of these weddings, I was quite early on approached by the groom, who asked if I would be interested in making the wedding cake. I have to say that it was certainly with mixed emotions I received this request (I wasn't extremely surprised though, as he had dropped hints earlier). A wedding cake was something I had been wanting to do for a long time, and would without doubt be larger than any previous baking project I had done, so it was very exciting. On the other hand, it was also quite nerve-wrecking, as this is something that just cannot be allowed to fail - I didn't want to be the one who ruined their wedding day by messing up the cake. The fact that I now live in London, and the wedding obviously would be in Sweden didn't make it easier. Anyhow, after more discussions with the bride and groom (to try to figure out what kind of cake they wanted, for how many people, etc) I agreed to do it (though I don't think I ever REALLY considered saying no... I wanted to do it too much).

So, now the big question was "What kind of cake should I make?". In Sweden, we don't really have the tradition of "multi-tiered fruitcake with royal icing" creations for wedding cakes as is common in other parts of the world (at least UK and US), so that was not something that I wanted to do (while we don't do multi-tiered cakes where the tiers are stacked on top of each other (though I've seen that too), we still have multiple "levels", but it's more common for this to be achieved through having multiple cakes on a form of scaffolding).
The bride and groom had give me a lot of freedom with the design of the cake, which has both pros and cons. I do prefer having a lot of creative freedom to do things that I believe will be good and not told "do exactly this", but at the same time, you need to get SOME input to make sure that you don't make the main flavour one that the bride hates or something like that.
So, even though it was hard to get the input I wanted from them, I finally got some flavour suggestions.... But was it the suggestion I wanted? No.... She wanted to have something that had a LEMON flavour... And preferrably no white chocolate. Great... There are many flavours that I might have chosen myself, but lemon certainly was not one of those, so now I was a tad confused on what I should do. Oh, well. Time to start looking for lemony recipes (and a few others as well, just in case I would have to decide that there would be no lemons in the cake). The white chocolate issue was less of a problem to me (I thought) as I'm not that big of a fan of white chocolate anyway, but white chocolate can be good in wedding cakes as you are likely to want them to be white.

As I wanted a good recipe that I could expect a good and reliable result from (and I wanted something that would not just taste "good", but that would make people remember the wedding cake for a loong time...), my obvious source to look towards was Pierre Hermé as I really like his recipes (but also searched eGullet and other forums... both for recipes as well as practical advice on what to think about and how to know how much cake to make).

To be continued in part 2, where I try to hunt down the perfect recipe. (And whatever you do - don't miss part 4 or something like that, where the pictures will be.)