A real fake wedding cake: Part 3 - Decorating

Make no mistake—one of the main purposes of decorating is to hide the mistakes from "frosting.” Another is, of course, to make your cake look nice.

Decorating principles

Photo from www.wedding-
flowers-and-reception-ideas.com

I discovered that when decorating, ribbon is your friend. Real wedding cakes often use real ribbon, or at least fondant that looks so much like real ribbon that no one will question it, so you can just buy some shiny ribbon from a crafts store and use it without bothering to make it look edible. This will cover up any imperfections in the bottom half of each tier, as well as hide the edges between tiers where the boxes doesn’t quite sit flat.

Real flowers are also a pretty easy way to decorate. In fact, if you use ribbon and flowers liberally, you could probably get away with minimal work (a couple layers of paint over a paper mache box). Ribbons and flowers are also quite easy to remove (you can tape ribbons on with painter’s tape) and then you can redecorate your cake if you don’t like it, or reuse it for another wedding.

My cake

How much ribbon will you need? A little geometry refresher

Cindy wanted the cake simple and modern-looking, so ribbons and flowers were pretty much my strategy. Fortunately, she was ok with colors being only close enough to the color scheme, so I got away with generic ribbon from the craft store. The large flower on top was fake, while the smaller orchids were helpfully provided by the florist. I had no idea what fresh flowers the florist would have and I wasn't counting on them, so they were a bonus.

Photo by Erika Jackson

Photo by Erika Jackson

Photo from weddingcakecreations.com

Play around with it

Cloth is one of my favorite things to use in decorating. It is pretty cheap and has a good elegance to effort ratio. That is, it’s easy to drape a swath of cloth over anything, and it usually looks pretty classy. Other decorating ideas might require 800% more work and give only 70% of the results. There are wedding cakes that use fondant to make cloth-like swaths, which I think looks really nice. It will also cover up a lot of imperfections on the surface of your cake. If you want to try this, you should probably pick a cloth with very fine weave, if you care to make sure it doesn’t look like cloth. Another thought is that you could spray-paint it onto the cake so that they’re all the same color and gloss.

Photo from projectwedding.com

Because I'm OCD, I went through many iterations of the spackle-sand-paint process so that the surface of my cake was smooth. If I were smarter, I would have just given up on it and gone for different decorating methods to hide parts of the surface that were pocked. Strings of pearls along the edges might have saved me a lot of spackling (and the touch-up work I had to do when I dropped one of the finished tiers corner-first). I also didn't play around with the tier placement, although it's fairly simple to experiment with that when your cake is fake. Asymmetry is interesting, whether it’s from tiers of different heights, or tiers being off center. It’s actually fashionable these days to make your cakes look crooked and crazy, as long as it looks like you meant it. I spent a lot of time perusing wedding cake galleries for ideas, although I ultimately went with a really simple style.

Other ideas

I initially thought of putting a layer of styrofoam atop each tier and squishing the edges down to round out the corners. I even bought two sheets of styrofoam from Home Depot (they were cheap). However, it would only round out the edges along the top of the cake, not the sides, and I wasn’t sure how well the styrofoam would take spackle (might rip up the foam) or paint (might corrode or just soak in) so I ended up scrapping this idea and returning the sheets. For round cakes, round styrofoam shapes might be hard to cut out as well.

It occurred to me at some point that the easiest thing to do would be to pour a ton of paint over each tier and let it dry. The thickness might be able to cover up most imperfections. I didn’t have enough paint to try this out, but it might work? Somebody try it and let me know =)

I also thought of buying clay and using it just like fondant. I would need slightly off-white clay that would air dry. The problem was that clay was relatively expensive and I couldn’t justify the cost of buying that much, especially if it didn’t work out. Small amounts would still be useful for decoration though. It looks enough like fondant that you could believe it was edible.

One last note - don't forget about the cakestand. For the most part, you can go with just a bit of aluminum under the cake, but it's going to look a bit odd if you have your supposedly-real cake sitting directly on top of the table. I left mine until the last second and had to convince my boyfriend to go out and find an appropriately sized board, cover it with foil, and bring it to the wedding. It's not hard, just one more thing to think about. Also, make sure you set up the cake before the guests arrive. Pulling it out of a box and stacking it in front of them sort of ruins the effect (although it's fun to watch their eyes bug when you put the cake away at the end of the evening).

Well, that's it for cakes for now. Alicia out.