Well it's about time I guess- I was asked way back in December to do my twin's wedding cake. Lots of deliberating,tasting, travel to and fro and planning via phone and email as they live on the other side of Canada. Not to mention huge anxiety, not only this being my first wedding, but since her now-husband is in politics, a vast majority of the wedding guests were you know, serious guests (in my mind, that raised the pressure a lot that I was maybe in over my head, since for one thing, the wedding photographer was a professional who takes pics in parliament etc....lots of months for me to stress). So if that wasn't enough to stress about, I had decided on 150 cupcakes with edible gerberas on top of each. My thoughts to save time originally were to make the daisies ahead of time and package them and bring them on the plane. In the end, I made the huge block of fondant here and packaged it in my suitcase on the plane along with my cupcake tins and other tools (laughing to myself as I wondered what the customs people were thinking when they scanned my suitcase through security!). At any rate, nobody stopped and questioned me. My twin sister ended up having a KA so I kicked out all the various family members three evenings in a row the week before the wedding and baked 150 cupcakes and a 4 layer 6 inch cake (which was originally going to go on top of the tower- HA- lofty ambitions, considering the tower itself was made out of 1 inch cardboard pieces- strong mind you but not exactly supportive of a 6 inch cake with that many tiers. So anyway, the construction process was fun- trips to Walmart to find the fabric, brainstorming how to glue, staple , sew etc the tiers together. In the end, the photo that was taken by a friend of mine was not the 'best side' so you can totally see how teetery it is. I copy pasted in the 6 inch cake onto the side where it ended up sitting next to the dual coloured ribbon tied serving utensils.
Much to my chagrin, by the time the MC had gone through people's speeches, he quickly announced it was time to eat cake,. and I guess hasn't been to too many weddings, as he didn't really set up the announcement by including that the couple would be doing pictures first. So there was a bit of a stampede to the table and a couple of people started taking cupcakes off the table two at a time, which made me freak out, so I set my nephews on them to stand guard while my sister and her husband got there to do cutting pictures.
In the end, we had a great time. I made a third vanilla, a third lemon, and a third chocolate, and the lemon and vanilla were recipes from Scott Woolley's book. The BC on the lemon cupcakes was lemon, vanilla bean on the vanilla, and the chocolate was also the same as the cake, and the cake was filled with irish cream macadamia nut white chocolate filling, and the icing was the same, without macadamia nuts.

Anyway I want to thank everyone on here who gave me general advice, who emailed me back information on transporting via plane, fondant vs gumpaste issues, cake tower construction and numerous other topics. I would say there was nothing stressful about this process, except the fact that the wedding reception location had no refrigeration, so after the ceremony I had to zip back to my brother in law's place to pick up the cupcakes/cake (the guy's poor fridge was devoid of food for almost a week as there was no room in it for anything but cake stuff LOL). That in itself wasn't actually so bad, except coming back to the hall and having been directed to this tiny square table that was teetery and uneven. There I panicked, but the caterers offered me one of their tables which ended up being out of the way of traffic (the one shown).

Oh and the only tedious thing was cutting out 150 gerberas of course I fell in love with Ontario cake stores by the way- THANK YOU A million times to the ones who recommended Bulk Barn to me! OMG I loved that store. We don't have it in BC here. All we have on the Island where I live is Michaels- which is a fun place to shop, but they're not really well stocked or cheap for cake stuff. I think I had noticed at that point the gerbera daisy cutter that includes in the middle also a stamp that not only cuts out the petals but imprints the veins on them. And I had already gone over my budget for my trip and also had the petal cutter set, so I didn't buy it (definitely a time consuming mistake, lol). Instead, I cut out 2 sets of big petals and also small ones, and made veins with a toothpick on each of them. As you can imagine, had I charged for these I think I would have been losing money or charging a thousand dollars for labour alone!

Anyway, it was a gorgeous wedding- I cried. And I'm stoked, although no other siblings getting married any time soon- but my nephew and his fiancee are getting married in 2010 and asked me to make their cake. So who knows, I might some day get good at this.

Again, thanks for the support from those who gave it. I will get a photo from the professional photographer next week and upload it to my files, after the federal election is over and he has time for more trivial things like wedding photos

CONGRATULATIONS!!! Beautiful colors! I love the way you draped the tower too! So elegant! I have yet to do something like this. I've done only one wedding cake and it was quite small and simple. I'm going to do something sort of like this for a teacher appreciation luncheon we have right before thanksgiving break from school. I'm basically just using it as an excuse because I've wanted to do this cupcake tower thing for awhile. Anyway......thanks so much for sharing!! Great job!!!

Very beautiful tower!!!!!!!

Whew! Sounds stressful, but the cake looks great!

I have my first wedding next month. It's my cousin's wedding and I'm just doing it as my gift to them. I realize it doesn't have to be perfect, but I'm already stressing over it.