Wedding Cake with Edible Photos, Blossoms and Butterflies

My first wedding cake!  Blossoms, butterflies, edible photo and bling.

This past weekend I completed my first ever wedding cake!  Talk about stress!  It was for a friend who was a part of the drama cast for whom I prepared the "Rohio and Juliet" cake.  The couple wanted edible photos, the red-white-black color scheme, and eventually arrived at the preference for blossoms on the cake.

Back of the cake - on display to everyone but facing away from the wedding party

The custom in Kenya is to have some smaller cakes that are given to the parents and close family to take home; so I made a 4-tier (20 kg of cake!) for everyone, and then surrounded it with 3 family cakes, each carrying 2 plaques of the couple's photo.

Decoration was easy and fun - fondant butterflies and blossoms of various sizes, hand-painted to get a nice effect.  For fun, I got some edible diamonds and added those for decor emphasis.  Note to self- don't use them again unless I have proper edible glue.  They are made of isomalt and have a tendency to melt when stuck on with corn syrup or royal icing.  I had to replace all of them while setting up the cake at the wedding.  (They are also really difficult to get out of the packaging.  I finally discovered that they are like jelly, and was able to pry them out with a toothpick.)

I used a Wilton imprint mat to print a pattern of vines on the fondant covering the cakes.  

My biggest stress point was getting the fondant large enough to cover 14" and 12" cakes that were 5" high without breaking or stretching the fondant!  Then there were a lot of mistakes to hide - some small cracks, some creased fondant (I've really got to work on my covering and piping techniques!) - but flowers and photos cover a multitude of sins!

The main blossoms and butterflies wedding cake with edible diamonds