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cake and monkeys

Yes, yes, but what everyone really wants to know is, what did the cake look like? I present to you the truly amazing Seasons of Love cake:



It's the most amazing cake ever. Look at all the detail! The top of each layer was made out of hardened sugar; I have no idea how that even works, but it was beautiful. The flowers and lilypads and everything else are made out of gum paste or royal icing. The cake artists have a full writeup, which covers the entire process, here. Ryan and Leigh spent most of last week making this cake. It was chocolate, with various fillings (mint, chocolate chip, hazelnut...I'm forgetting something) and it was completely delicous in addition to being deeply cool. I let them surprise me; I had no idea what the cake would look like until I saw it the day of the wedding. I'm so glad I did, because I never would have come up with anything this wonderful!

Yes, those are dancing yeti:

Each layer had an animal couple: Here are the dragonflies, the frogs, and the caterpillars:





Good detail shots of the animal pairs, the royal icing snowflakes, and the hard candy tops. Making the tops involved creating silicone molds of the leaf and flower shapes, and then pouring in the candy. Science!

Leigh activated the cake while wearing the Master of the Dark Pastry Arts apron that Ryan made for her. The mechanism involved an additional flower which broke through a lattice in the top layer and unfolded. It didn't make it out all the way, but it was still a very cool effect. It's not like you get a practice run when you're dealing with cakes.

Here, you can see where the flower came out when Leigh activated the cake. It broke through the grid and came out.

I got the tablecloth for the cake table on ebay - it's sage green satin, and formerly worked at the Ritz Carlton in Pasadena according to the description. The spokes on top are sheer pink and orange ribbons; there are silk gerbera daisies on the ends of the ribbons, hanging over the table edge.

The hanging ribbons you can see in some of the photos are part of the ribbon canopy which was behind the cake. I'd been opportunistically buying ribbon on sale for months, and this is where it all ended up. I added more of those little pink daisies to some of the ribbons. I got 360 of them on eBay for $8, and used up almost all of them between the invitations, programs, and ribbons.


Apparently Dennis was being attacked by the cake canopy, and it's possible that I bit him during the cake-feeding; we can't really remember what's happening here.


And monkey brides! These windup toys were favors. My mom, a former gift shop owner, called up an old supplier and got me a gross of monkeys. I glued earrings and veils on them. I had originally planned to do monkey grooms, but I couldn't find suitable hats and the monkey brides were really fun to do, so I just made them all brides.
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