The story of a wedding cake (part 3)

I was now ready to take on the biggest baking project that I had ever done so far. I had a recipe that I was fairly confident in. I had scoured every kitchen I could think of to find as many spring form pans as possible and packed my other important equipment (thermometer, scales, mixer). It was now time to bake.

The wedding was going to be on a Saturday, so on the Thursday before that, I got on the bus and went down to Övik, where the wedding should be. I met up with the bride and groom and we went shopping. Actually turned out to be able to get everything I needed at a quite reasonable cost. Not bad at all. I had planned to go out to the place where the wedding should be at once (in a smaller village outside the city) as I was promised the use of the kitchen out there to make the cake on site. My plan was to at least create the lemon cream for all the cakes (I had decided to make a total of 8 cakes in different sizes) and freeze it (you create a disk of frozen lemon cream that you later assemble onto the cake), and hopefully get started on some of the things that needed to be baked. Took a while to be able to get out there, and I was informed that we needed to leave in a while to pick up another person. Stressful, and while we were quite late to picking up the person, I managed to at least get the lemon cream done (this was the most crucial thing to get done this day as it needed time to freeze).

Fortunately, the kitchen was very large and good, so I had plenty of space to work on, and two ovens so I could have two things in there simultaneously.

Early the next morning I went back out there again and got started with the daquoise and the ladyfinger disks. This took quite a long time and it was late by the time all of them had come out of the oven. As more and more of these became finished, I started whipping up the white chocolate cream and taking out lemon cream disks from the freezer to assemble cakes.
Before going to bed this day, I had assembled all the cakes and put them in the refridgerators to allow the cream to set (this is of course always a bit nerve-wrecking, as you don't want to get there the day of the wedding to see that the cream DIDN'T set and your entire cakes are just flowing out over the table).

Even earlier the morning of the wedding I took all my stuff and came back out there to start decorating the cakes. I was happy to see that they were not collapsing and looked pretty good. I now had 8 cakes to decorate, and not a lot of time to do it. So I had to start whipping some cream. The decoration moment was one that I had somewhat dreaded, since while I'm quite confident in my baking skills, I'm less of a visual artist. I had among other things been considering making sugarpaste flowers and even bought myself a kit for that, but soon realized that it would not be a good idea. So I just went for simple, but stylish. Piped cream "stars" with silver dots on top of them, and pink hearts made with a cookie cutter from a thin piece of the sugar paste I had bought. Looks pretty good, and very "weddingy" if I may say so myself.

After the vows, plenty of good food, speaches, and other things that happen at Swedish weddings, it was finally time for THE CAKE. I went out to the kitchen and helped them mount it on the cake stand, and it was served.
Everybody (most importantly, the bride and groom) were very happy with the cake. I received multiple comments from people on how good it was, so I was also happy. (Though, as the self-critic I am, I did think I had a bit too much of the lemon cream in it....)

I had now successfully made a wedding cake. I've learnt a number of things:
* 8 cakes were way too many.
* If you've had a metal spoon in a very hot oven, the metal spoon will also be very hot. Do not try to pick it up using just your hand. It will hurt.
* Planning is everything.