Creating a Navy wedding cake with textured icing was way out of my comfort zone. You’ll see from my photos I create a lot of semi naked wedding cakes using fresh flowers or smooth iced pale coloured wedding cakes.
I’ve seen dark and navy wedding cakes flying around the internet for a while and am increasingly being asked to create them, so I took the bull by the horns and started sketching some ideas.
I knew I wanted to include ruffles and have gold feature very heavily in the design.
The first challenge was to source Navy icing, I generally find buying dark colours as appose to mixing your own works better, for light and white cakes I use Massa Tincino sugarpaste but they don’t produce a navy. So on recommendation I tried Sugar Paste Direct . I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at the quality and the way it covers, it gave a flawless covering with no cracking. That probably will only make sense to other cake makers but basically that’s very good!
When creating a cake the first place to start is with a blank canvas, so I cover the whole cake with sugar paste for the base and then build my design on top of that. I started by adding torn ruffles to the bottom and top tier which was then overlaid with some bas relief flowers using Karen Davies Moulds. A few other bas relief flowers were randomly placed on the tiers. Once I’d given it an hour or so to harden I brushed the bas relief with gold dust and painted the edges of the ruffles with gold paint.
The middle tier was a completely new technique to me, introducing an aged cracked texture seemed so wrong as I am always striving for smoothness and perfection.
So how did I create this look? A few key items are needed. A handheld blow torch, some dried out sugar paste, sugar crystals and edible gold paint (gold dust mixed with a little vodka).
To start roll out a large enough circle of white sugar paste to cover the tier. Crumble the dried out sugar paste and sugar crystals to the sugarpaste. I loved this next stage, blow torch the rolled out paste making sure in some areas you go heavier than others. Let this cool for a few minutes then paint on the gold. Once the gold has dried which won’t take long using your rolling pin roll the icing further, as you do this the icing will crack giving that aged crackled look.
As you would normally do, cover the cake using this textured sheet. It may crack and break in places but just go with it, leaving all the imperfections as it will add to the aged look.
To finish I added some simple gold leaves.
Don’t forget when your cake is finished the way it is displayed can completely change the look of your cake. Here I have used one of the wooden stands from Prop Options.
I hope you like this Navy Wedding Cake as much as I do.
Sadie x
LINKS
http://www.cakebysadiesmith.co.uk/gallery
http://www.karendaviessugarcraft.co.uk