The story of a wedding cake (part 2)

I was now on the hunt for the perfect recipe (or combination of recipes) to use to make the wedding cake. As expected, I read every recipe in my Pierre Hermé recipe books and also scoured food blogs and forums for ideas. This was tricky... Two cakes caught my attention a bit extra were the Riviera and the Rhubarb and White Chocolate Charlotte (PH recipes of course). The Riviera had the benefit of being the only of the cakes that I found that had that alluring flavour requested by the bride - lemon... The Charlotte is a cake that I had made once before and liked it. It did of course not have any lemon in it, and it did contain white chocolate, which wasn't one of the favourite flavours of the bride... As I needed to experiment, I assembled a group of brave volunteers to sample my different creations (they did seem quite happy to be my selected guinea pigs), and at two different occasions I made the two cakes above.

The Riviera was the first cake I made. The cake was pretty good (had a nice chocolate mousse in it), butI have to say that I didn't find the combination of the lemon with the chocolate that great (but then again, I usually do not fancy chocolate that is combined with oranges, lemon, etc...), and this cake also had another problem - it's colour. Since it's a chocolate cake, it is obviously brownish, and typically wedding cakes would be white, or at least bright colour (though I've seen at least two chocolate wedding cakes, and they have been the best wedding cakes I've tried that I haven't baked myself). After a conversation with the groom, he also confirmed that they wished for a white cake. Of course, it is possible to cover a chocolate cake with white marzipan or whipped cream, or some kind of icing. I did however not want to use marzipan (way too common in Sweden) and if you use some form of white icing on a dark cake, it can be hard to cover it completely without the darker colour shining through.

A couple of weeks later it was time for my second experiment - the rhubarb and white chocolate charlotte. This is a very light and "airy" cake (dangerously so, become it doesn't feel heavy at all when eating it, but inspecting the list of ingredients, it isn't really a healthy cake...) and I like it. This one also received the approval of my panel of guinea pigs (they liked the previous one as well, but preferred this one). This cake also has the benefit of looking more "wedding-like" since it is very white. Of course, this cake was lacking lemon, and contained white chocolate. I didn't consider the white chocolate issue to be too serious as the flavour of it is not very dominating in this cake. Personally I think that white chocolate can easily become too sweet, but I didn't have such problems with this cake. Promising that it wouldn't become too dominating, I received the blessings of the bride to include some white chocolate in the cake. The rhubarb in this cake adds a tangy touch that goes well with the sweetness of the white chocolate. I was now starting to think of the similar properties between lemon and rhubarb (both are quite tangy) and thinking of replacing the rhubarb compote in this cake with the lemon cream from the Concorde. My flatmate also suggested replacing one of the ladyfinger disks in the cake with something else, like a daquoise.

I made all those substitutions and came up with a cake consisting of the following (from bottom to top):
A layer of hazelnut daquoise
A layer of lemon cream
A layer of white chocolate whipped cream
A layer of ladyfinger disk
A layer of white chocolate whipped cream

When this is all set, the cake is lightly coated with whipped cream.

I now finally had an idea of what I wanted to make, and looking at the recipes it seemed to be a feasible task that should still result in a good cake. Of course, I had never made this particular version of the cake before, so I couldn't know if it would work or not... Fortunately, the week before the wedding, we had a family "reunion" kind of thing where lots of people met up, so I had the opportunity to make a final test run there. The cake turned out fine, and when there even started to be rumours about my cake (as I was standing next to the cake table, one person (who didn't know who I was) asked me if I knew which one was the cake that everybody was saying was so good), I felt quite confident that I would do OK next week.

Stay tuned for the riveting next episode in the story of the wedding cake... The actual baking of the cake...