Merrill Moore Wedding Cake

Happy Sunday!  Wow, October is a big month for weddings!  I’m getting ready for another big event next weekend.  This week’s featured cake, from the first of October, was for my friends Brian Lennon and Merrill Moore.

The reception was located on a farm in Franklin and was the most beautiful fall wedding I have ever seen!  The whole theme was country chic - classy and elegant, yet simple and natural.  The food was great southern BBQ.  And the flowers from Phillipe Chadwick were absolutely stunning….circus roses, mums, daliahs, and daisies in reds, oranges, yellows, and greens.  And of course the cake was great! Merrill wanted a simple buttercream cake with fresh flowers to fit with the rest of her décor. 

This cake was the largest wedding cake I have made so far.  It feed 250 people! 

All in all the cake and frosting took:
4 dozen eggs
7 lbs butter
16 cups of sour cream
12 lbs powdered sugar
18 lbs flour

That’s a lot of ingredients!

Since the bottom layer of the cake was so large (16 inches across), I tried a new technique to help it bake more evenly and more quickly.   I used Wilton flower nails, which are supposed to be used to pipe buttercream roses on to, but I put them in the middle of the cake to conduct the heat into the core of the cake.  

It worked perfectly!  The cakes were much flatter and baked in 10-15 minutes less time than without the flower nails!  I still had to trim the cakes to make them perfectly flat, but not as much as I usually do.

I had to make 6 mixer bowls full of icing to cover all the cakes…which in case you are wondering, is a ton of icing!  I felt like I was frosting cake for hours!  

Sometimes I stack the cakes before I transport them to the reception site, but since this one was going about an hour away and I didn’t have anyone to help me lift that cake, I decided to take all the cakes separately and assemble them on site. 

So, once I got to the reception and unloaded all the cakes, I stacked them together and added the fresh flowers.  Since the flowers weren’t pesticide-free, I wrap all the stems so that they don’t come in contact with the cake itself.  Here my brother is wrapping flowers for me.

Once all the flowers were on the cake, the finished product was absolutely beautiful!  It looked so perfect against the barn and red gate on the farm.

Since I had to cut so many slices of cake…250, remember?...I recruited a couple of friends to help me serve.  We cut 200 slices in less than 10 minutes!  Now, that’s a record!

Congratulations to Brian and Merrill!