Inspiration

This month I am taking part in the March Meet The Maker challenge on instagram. Each day is a new prompt inspired by ‘Your 2020 Business Story’. Here are my first few posts:

STORY

I shared the story of my grey ombré wedding cake design in my blog post here. From how the design almost didn’t happen, the meaning behind the design, how it went viral and sparked a trend for grey wedding cakes and how it went on to be featured by @prestonrbailey @thecakeblog and @neighbours. 

HANDS AT WORK 

Here are my hands at work, painting watercolour lavender flowers, making sugar flowers and assembling everything together on the cake. 

I have a full FREE tutorial for this watercolour wedding cake available below and you can find my simple wax flower tutorial here.

TIME

One of the questions I am asked the most when meeting with clients is How long does it take to make a wedding cake? This is one of the most difficult questions to answer because each wedding cake is so different. 
I think it is easy for people to underestimate the amount of time that goes into making a wedding cake. So much goes into making a luxury wedding cake, from designing the cake, ordering and purchasing any special equipment/ ingredients, baking, making and preparing fillings, torting, fillings and ganache, covering in sugar paste, ensuring a smooth finish and sharp edges- and this is all before the decorating even starts!

The sugar flowers in the cake pictured below were all made to tie in with the fresh flowers being used in the wedding and the colours that were being incorporated throughout the wedding. 

The freesia sprays take approximately 1 hour per spray. In the image below you can see the freesia sugar flowers before assembly. Each flower is individually made from flower paste which is custom coloured, attached to wire and then brushed with petal dusts, before taping together. The ranunculus are constructed with 50+ petals per flower, before being brushed with petal dusts. The sugar roses were made in 3 different sizes and shades, the sugar leaves are all individually wired so that they can be placed at different angles throughout the arrangement and the gypsophila have floral tape applied to each individual stem. 
Overall the sugar flowers on this wedding cake alone are over 10+ hours of work. Sugar flowers are definitely a labour of love but also one of my favourite thing to make!

CLOSE UP

A close up of a sugar rose ready for dusting with petal dust. 

LOVE TO MAKE

My absolute favourite thing to make is sugar roses!

I hope you enjoyed reading my first few posts of the March Meet the Maker challenge. Make sure to follow along with the rest of the challenge over on instagram by searching the hashtag #marchmeetthemaker to see all the posts from the amazing community of makers taking part.

Today I am sharing the story of my grey ombre wedding cake design. From how the design almost didn’t happen, the meaning behind the design, how it went viral and sparked a trend for grey wedding cakes and how it went on to be featured by Preston Bailey, The Cake Blog and on Neighbours!….

Back in 2014 I had an enquiry from a couple who wanted a wedding cake in the style of a mountain. They loved walking in the mountains of the Lake District and wanted to incorporate this into their wedding cake design. Novelty cakes are not my specialty, so I wasn’t sure if I would be the right designer for them. But, the couple also told me they also had another style in mind with ruffles. I set to work thinking about how we could incorporate the elegance of the ruffles with the story that was so important to them, and that is how the grey ombré design came about. The grey ombré ruffles were to represent the mountains of the lake district, finishing with the ruffled effect continuing on top of the cake, to represent the snow on the top of the mountain. The couple loved this more conceptual idea! 

After the wedding, when I posted the wedding cake on Instagram I had never seen such a reaction to a cake design. The likes and comments flooded in so quickly and within minutes I had a message from Carrie at The Cake Blog asking if I would like to take part in a feature about the cake! You can read the feature here. It went on to become the most read feature on The Cake Blog that year! Since then the cake has been pinned thousands of times on Pinterest and has become one of my most popular designs. I have created many variations of this design and in many colours.

The popularity of this style was initially a surprise to me as it was quite different from my usual style- with no sugar flowers! But it sparked a trend for grey wedding cakes for me. This became a really popular colour palette for my wedding cakes for a few years following this.

One a the first books I read when starting my business was ‘Dear Preston- doing business with our hearts. A practical and friendly guide to running your own creative service business’ by Preston Bailey. I would definitely recommend this book To anyone working in a creative business! So I was really excited when my grey ombré cake was featured on the Preston Bailey Facebook page. It received so many lovely comments and also some funny ones too, as it had been described as a ’50 shades of gray cake’ on the post. Some commenters didn’t think this was an appropriate theme for a wedding cake ?. Little did they know the true meaning behind the cake!

The grey ombré wedding cake was also featured by Sam Saboura, host of TLCs Something borrowed something new, which was really fun, because my Mum and I love watching that programme!

The design has since been recreated by wedding cake designers all over the world. I love it when I get sent photos from other cake designers of their grey ombré creations or questions about how I make it. I even saw a version of this wedding cake design on Neighbours recently!

It has been really fun to look back at the story behind my grey ombre wedding cake design. I am taking part in the March Meet the Maker challenge on instagram this month. With todays challenge being STORY. You can follow along with the challenge on instagram and I’ll be posting weekly roundups here on the blog.