How to make a wedding cake - Mad'n'Rob stylee

1) Choose your recipe - we're using Queen Delia's Creole Christmas cake but with added booze. We made a few at Christmas and they passed the taste-test-challenge.

2) Calculate the quantities of ingredients needed. We were going to do 15 times the given quanity, but decided that may be a bit excessive; we're now using 10 times the amount Queen Delia uses.




3) Soak the fruit in booze, spices and sugar; then leave in a fridge for five days.

Find one monster pan...



...add lots of booze...



...some spices...



...and lots of fruit.



Simmer on a very gentle heat for 15 minutes, or until you can no longer be bothered to wait for the liquid to get to simmering point because the flame is so gentle.



4) Five days later (and ideally more), invade the kitchen in the school's boarding house to use their industrial mixer. It's a whopper of a piece of kitchen machinery, but would still only fit half the cake mix at a time. Curses. We ended up making two batches of mixture.

For each batch, take some eggs and butter...



...add some dry ingredients...



...and the soaked fruit.



Use the whopper mixer and get very excited about the possibility of owning our own Kenwood Chef. Discuss the etiquette involved in buying our own wedding presents - would it be wrong to get our Kenwood now, or should we wait until we're actually married? After all, there are still many weeks left for Rob to come to his senses and dump me.





While the gunk is mixing, double line the tins. I love baking parchment. It's one of my most favourite baking things. (Until we own a Kenwood Chef, of course)



Each batch would have to fill two caketins, so we scientifically measured it out (in a way that would have real scientists spinning in their graves) using the "one for you, one for me" principle. This technique requires you to scoop the mix from bowl...



...and into tin one. Then repeat, scooping the mix into tin two. Repeat ad infinitum. Then lick spatula (once all scooping, poking, proding and smoothing is done - basic food hygiene is important and not to be sniffed at)



After both batches of mixture are made up, line the tins on the oven and marvel at the difference in colour between the two batches. It might be something to do with one batch getting a longer mixing, or having slightly more fruit, or having the fruit added in two goes instead of ten goes, or.... there's a whole realm of cake-experiemental-baking just waiting to be discovered.


5) After three hours cooking, cover the cakes with a double thickness of baking parchment while snorting the smell of cooking fruitcake. Check every 20 minutes after that until the first one cooks. Remove it from oven. Feel smug.



6) Once all cakes out of oven, leave them in their tins for 45 minutes then turn onto wire trays to finish cooling. Tick "make wedding cake" off to-do list.

Cake making - stage two

After leaving the fruit to soak (it should have had a week, but we've run out of time) we've been cake-baking this morning. We made two batches of mixture (only because the mixer isn't quite THAT big) and they're cooking away as I write. We're intending to do a photoguide to wedding cake making on here, but for now the pictures (of stages 1 and 2) are here.

Cake making - stage one

A photographic set of instructions for making a wedding cake starts here and continues through the set. I think I'm now drunk on the vapours. Wahoo!!

Things you learn...

...on bridezilla.com (the collective name given to all wedding planning websites where there are online forums and discussion boards). It astounds me how little I know about weddings. Did you know that it's possible to hire chocolate fountains for your reception? After discussion with Rob, we're looking to hire a tikka masala fountain. Or perhaps a chili dipping sauce fountain. Or maybe just a gravy fountain, with a range of chips, pies and sausages to hold in the cascades of gravy. Yum yum.

The Food

On Sunday we had the sausage sizzle. We bought 12 types of sausage from the local butchers, invited round six connoisseurs of porky pleasure and had an evening of sausage tasting and comparing notes. It was a blind tasting so Mad was the only person who knew which sausage was which; making the process even more exciting (sometimes the tension was unbearable). The sausages were all oven cooked and each type was bought out whole to allow for marks for appearance and then portioned out to each person for tasting, note making and general discussing. Marks were awarded for taste (out of 15), texture (out of 10) and appearance (out of 5) with each category weighted to reflect the importance of that category.

It was all hard work but somebody had to do it. After counting up scores,the wonders of spreadsheets proved that a firm winner has been found. We have discovered the best baked banger in south Derbyshire and will start to haggle with the butcher to try to get a discount for buying sausages by the pig load.

Tempus Fugit (and all that jazz)

There are - according to a countdown on bridezilla.com - 55 days to go until we get hitched. On one hand, this is a bad thing, as I'm as impatient as an impatient woman. On the other hand, it's a good thing as there's still a few things to do. On another hand, most of it's sorted out and there certainly isn't enough to occupy fifty-five days' worth of weddingy activity. Ah. That makes three hands. It's a good job that my wedding dress has more than the normal number of sleeves.

Talking of the white tent dress, I got what some refer to as "THE CALL" to say that it had arrived at the shop. Luckily, my school holidays happen to have corresponded nicely with this event, so I headed off on Tuesday to assess the damage caused by my excessive eating and drinking. I took Ian, who is a colleague and a man with a good sense of style, as I have so much fashon sense that I think it's fine to wear odd socks and have been known to sport a thermal long-sleeve top under a t-shirt. Luckily, he approved of the choice, swooned over the footwear, and did the excited dance when looking at the tiaras: the omens bode well. Being a stumpy short-arse, I'd orered the dress in "stumpy short-arse length" (which basically knocks three inches off the hem length) and this, combined with the miraculous pull-it-all-in lace-up back, means that it needs no alterations at all. Rock and roll!!

Ian, my mum and the woman in the wedding-dress shop then got talking about jewellery and accessories - I was too busy swishing around the shop in my dress to pay much attention - and so it was decided for me that we should go necklace shopping that very afternoon. After healthy sandwiches and no jam doughnuts (curse my mother's attempts to keep me thin) we set off to Bewdley to find a small shop that did costume jewellrey, as recommended by the dress-shop woman. I'm still not convinced that we found the actual shop she was talking about, but we did track down two necklaces. After all, if I can have three arms I can certainly have two necks. The "wedding outfit" checklist seems to be completed. Phew - that's one less thing to faff about.

Another area that I've been contemplating is flowers. Way back in February I tried arranging flowers for the tables and somehow managed to succeed; my thoughts have since turned to my bunch (I refuse to use the word "bouquet" because that implies style, poncing and faffing - I just want something to hold so I have something to fiddle with during the service). I had walked over to Willington, a local village, and popped into the florists there on the off-chance. This florist does beautiful arrangements and bouquets and I thought that she would laugh scornfully at my feeble request for some gerberas in red, yellow and orange. However, ten minutes later, the woman there had agreed to make a suitable bunch, and charged me the grand total of fifteen squid. Bargain! I know that some people spend hundreds if not thousands on flowers, but I'm quite chuffed with what she's going to do. "Flower" checklist - nearly done.

This afternoon the team of chefs are visiting to look over the cooking facilities here at school. We went to our two local butchers' shops yesterday and now have 14 types of sausage in the fridge, waiting to be eaten at tonight's sausage testing. We've spent some time discussing condiments, sauces and gravy. All we need to do now is to run everything past the cooking powers that be, get their agreement and approval, and I can head off to the cash-and-carry to buy the stuff. "Wedding meal" checklist well under way to completion.

Rob's database wizardry seems to be standing the strain, and we've had many RSVPs back already. There are a few replies to chase, and some more invites to send out (ok, ok, we've fallen slightly behind on this one, no need to nag!), but it's mostly there. I wouldn't say that the "administration" checklist is complete, but it's looking far more organised that three weeks ago. We've had a fine selection of responses, many containing fishy quips, so the cream of the crop may well appear here at some point. Until then, I'm off to lurk through bridezilla.com to laugh at the neurotic women stressing about napkins.