My sister's wedding macaron tower!

Ah yes, for my sister's wedding, there was a macaron tower too!

I tease my little sis about being a bridezilla, she's not at all, but she sounded like one for a moment when I got a picture text of a 10-tier tower one day last year, and the message "oh, you do these macaron things don't you, how easy would this be?" Heh.

Tower stand sourced, we then practiced the carrying of unfilled shells in tupperware in hand luggage at Christmas. No problem! Well, no problem apart from the fact that 10-tiers is about 240 macarons, which is 480 halves.. or quite a lot of tupperware in hand luggage. :)

Just some of the many macarons for the hand luggage

Half of the shells were filled with a rich, dark chocolate ganache flavoured with my Nana's favourite, Cointreau, and the others are filled with white chocolate ganache with vanilla beans and spiked with my Mum's current favourite tipple, Amaretto.

Being bridesmaid to a busy bride who was already a little late for the ceremony meant that helping her into the dress and making sure the borrowed, blue, old and new items were all present and correct took priority over arranging the sweets display, and so my partner was left with the task of assembling and filling the tower.

The tower was to be part of the welcome drinks table, to greet guests after the ceremony along with the mimosas and as a snack for people in the long gap between breakfast and the "wedding breakfast" dinner which was to follow later in the day.

They were a big hit! We had filled the shells the day before so they would be perfectly 'slightly chewy' for the event. My Nana had about five of them and the photographers stashed a few away to take home. Excellent!

My sister's wedding cake (part 2)

Following on from the post about the making of the cakes, you now join me for part 2, as we assemble the cake at the venue on the big day!

The cakes survived the trip, a little wrinkled of fondant from the packaging but quite intact. I got to work with a cake smoother, applied another layer and we were good to go. So here it is, the finished thing!

I had made all the flowers in Tokyo and packed them lightly in tissues in cake boxes placed carefully in my hand luggage. I came to the venue prepared with a batch of royal icing to 'glue' the cakes together, stick the ribbon on and pipe the finishing touches.

The venue gave me the use of a storeroom for a while to set the cake up before the ceremony so I could get it just right.

The flowers were secured to the cake with very nifty little flower spikes that I ordered in England, much less bulky than the chunky white Wilton ones more commonly available in Japan.

You need to use something like a flower spike to keep the wires away from the cake, so that no rust or other contaminant can form inside the cake.

Along with the calla lilies mentioned in the previous post, I added peonies because they are beautiful made in sugar. The bling ribbon, sugar diamonds and royal icing pearls might be a touch too far for more conservative tastes, but featured separately on a few of the cakes my sister and I liked when we looked around at the kind of thing we fancied creating for her.

I was so relieved that each step of the journey went without a hitch. The trip from Japan, and to the country hall where the wedding was held. Assembled it then made the trip down a couple of sweeping flights of stairs into the dining room to be on show, and then to the dance floor where the cutting ceremony would take place under the disco lights. :)

Disco cake :)

I'm not sure why exactly, but it's supposed to be bad luck for the bride and groom to remove the knife from the cake after they make their ceremonial incision, and so they called me up to take it out.

The day was full of these little superstitions - she had an *old* sixpence in her left shoe all day, that my Dad had placed there, which she had *borrowed* from me. Her *new* thing was a bracelet Dad gave to her when he could see her for the first time all dressed up, and the *blue* item was good luck wishes written on the bottom of her shoes by her bridesmaids in blue ink. And of course, the groom had not been allowed to see the wedding dress until the day, and had not seen my sister since the previous day :) My sister awoke to the sound of birdsong, and that is supposed to be lucky. It was all quite fun.

At the very last moment, as the staff moved the cake from the dance floor they tripped on the tablecloth and my heart jumped for a moment, but it was all fine. They cut the bottom fruit and middle chocolate tier into the traditional 1-inch sticks of cake that are commonly used in British weddings and served it up with a sandwich buffet.

The newlyweds have saved the top tier of the cake, as is tradition. British wedding cake is pretty indestructible, and couples are supposed to be able to save the smallest tier for their first Christmas together, their first anniversary, or christening of their first child. I've heard of people saving cakes for years... Though those are probably royal iced rather than fondant-covered cakes however.

Traditional portion size at British weddings

Both cakes had held up fantastically during the trip, and tasted great! (I'm quite strict with myself and so it's an accomplishment that I was satisfied ;) ) I needn't have worried about the brief 1-month maturation of the fruit cakes, as they were lovely, moist and flavoursome. Phew, my job as big sister and baker done :)

I'm so happy I could do something special for my beautiful little sister's big day. Congrats sis!

My Sister's wedding cake (part 1)

Would it survive being packed in a check-in suitcase and thrown around Heathrow airport? Would they lose my case? Here follows the first post detailing the adventures of my sister's traditional British wedding cake!

The top tier, ready for feeding with brandy

For Christmas last year I experimented with taking sugar flowers and a fondant-iced and royal-iced traditional Christmas fruitcake to my sister in England, for a taste test and to see if the cake could travel well in my suitcase.

This trial run was successful and as I type this part of the blog post I'm back on another plane, 6 months later, with a much larger fruitcake, a smallish one, and a ganached and fondant-covered chocolate cake to use for the day itself... Please, Virgin Airways, please don't lose my case, don't throw it around too much and don't drop it!

The two fruitcake tiers of the wedding cake began life over a month ago, just after my kitchen was up and running. I would have liked a longer time to mature the cakes, but hoped that a month with regular feeding with brandy would be enough to develop some good flavour. I baked a couple of practice fruitcakes and moved onto the monster bottom tier which is 26 cm in diameter by about 10cm height.

It's, oh I don't know, it must be almost 4kg all on its own with all that fruit! It practically fills my case in its hefty box, leaving just enough space for a smaller tin for the top layer, oh, that and my 'Cadbury's purple' bridesmaid dress (thanks sis) ;).

The top and bottom tiers are going to be traditional wedding cakes. Fruit: currants, raisins, sultanas, homemade mixed peel, apricots all soaked in brandy and later added to orange and lemon zest, nuts, molasses, homemade mixed spice and cinnamon, brown sugar etc. It's a heady and heavy concoction. The middle tier will be a moist chocolate cake filled and covered in rich ganache and then covered in purple fondant to match the bridesmaid dresses.

Once tied up in paper to protect against the long bake, and baked for hours - making my balmy April Tokyo kitchen smell like November in England - the cakes are fed with more brandy and packed away to mature.

The feeding with brandy was repeated numerous times over the coming weeks, and the cake was stored in the 12C cool table - a decision made due to the impending hot and humid Tokyo weather, because we want a matured cake and not a truly fermented one.

The weekend before I set off to England and the time came to marzipan (also home made, and yes I just used the word marzipan as a verb, oh dear). Trying out a few tricks I found in an old cake decorating book, I plugged with marzipan some of the larger dimples in the cake that had been formed by raisins getting sucked inward during baking, and built a collar around the rounded edge of the top of the cake, that was to become the bottom. This was then left to dry out completely for a few days before applying the icing.

Despite the superior taste of royal icing, we went for rolled fondant. The main reasons were that fondant is much easier to cut (for the cake cutting ceremony smoothness (!) and for slicing into the traditional 1-inch sticks of cake with all guests), and that we wanted to stack the cakes directly on top of each other in 3 layers. Stacking like this requires dowelling the cake, for stability, and this isn't advisable/possible with a royal iced cake.

Perhaps if we had gone with all 3 layers of wedding cake being made of fruitcake (and quite thick royal icing) we could have placed the cakes directly atop each other, but with one of the cakes being a softer, chocolate cake, I didn't want to risk it collapsing under the weight of the top fruitcake tier on my sister's big day. Fondant and dowels it was then.

The flowers were chosen to match the theme of the wedding - purple and ivory. My sister's bouquet is to be made from purple calla lilies and ours, as bridesmaids will be white. Above and below are some pictures of the practice cake and early stages of making some of the flowers.

Join me again shortly, for the next thrilling installment of the wedding cake adventure story. Did it make the trip?..!