I’m Lucie Fink.
I’m a video producer at Refinery29.
But every so often I like to try other people’s jobs.
It’s wedding season.
So today, I’m going to see if I have what it takes to make a wedding cake.
This is Lucie For Hire.
My first challenge was to consult with the bride and sketch the cake.
Making cakes are fun, but usually when I have people come in and even to intern a trial.
By the end of the day, they say, “Oh my gosh, I had no idea what goes into this.”
Developing an idea for a wedding cake is a learned skill.
There’s a lot to know, including the architecture of actually building the cake and you definitely
need to look at some examples for some inspiration.
I took a really good look at the cakes Lauren’s created and after listening to the bride’s
request, we came up with a workable design.
We settled on a three-tiered, yellow cake filled with raspberry buttercream, coated
with vanilla buttercream, and decorated with cascading sugar flowers.
Ready to bake?
I have never been more ready to do anything in my entire life.
Perfect.
To the kitchen.
Off we go!
And once we knew which direction we were going in, it was time for my second challenge:
baking the cake.
What we’re going to do first is grab eggs.
It smells so good in here.
So, this is a two cup.
So you could just measure two of these.
This is a dream.
Three cups of oil.
I’ve baked plenty of cakes from scratch before
but I’ve never made anything this large.
Let’s bake!
This is a gym membership, right?
Within each of the three tiers, there are three layers of cake.
So essentially for a three-tiered cake, we needed to bake nine cake layers.
For your third challenge,
we’re going to fill, crumb coat, and ice the cakes.
So what’s in there?
So this is buttercream.
Okay.
So this is meringue-style buttercream, which we have already made and have ready to go.
We folded fresh raspberries into the buttercream.
It adds some nice color.
And then I tasted it.
But we’ll see.
Most important, center the cake on the board.
Once you do this you can’t move it right?
Exactly.
You use your thumb as a guide and you spin it.
And you kind of look at the distance between there.
And you do a dam.
So this way it is very thin, but it is just is sort of your little barricade.
Okay, here it goes.
Building a buttercream dam is not as easy as it looks.
So would you hire me yet?
Listen, that’s why everyone comes in for a trial period.
I filled each layer of cake with the raspberry buttercream, wrapped each tier up, and popped
them in the fridge.
After each tier was filled and chilled, it was time to add the crumb coat.
A crumb coat is a thin layer of frosting that is spread over the cake, acting as a base
layer so that there won’t be any crumbs caught on the outside layer.
And then we finished it off with a final layer of icing.
For your final challenge, it is to build and decorate the cake.
Okay.
Ready?
Building a three-tiered cake is a complicated process.
We added wooden dowel rods to each layer to provide the cake with support and added some
final structural buttercream.
Because you can never have enough structural buttercream.
Now that it’s built.
We’re going to do the decorating.
So what we’re going to do is make some sugar flowers for the cake.
Is this edible?
It is edible.
What we use tastes like a marshmallow sugar.
Mm hmm.
Marshmallow sugar.
So it’s just like doing a cookie, in that equal pressure, pop it out, and here we go.
We punched out sugar flowers of all different shapes and sizes and then used a ball tool
to frill the petals.
We painted them with edible gold shimmer and just like that, we were ready to decorate.
Making a wedding cake is an art.
And a blank cake is just like a blank canvas.
It takes design skills and a keen eye to know where to place each flower, how to angle them
properly, and how many decorations you need until it’s just right.
You made a wedding cake.
We made a wedding cake.
Beginning to end.
How’d I do?
Pretty good.
Do you think that you would hire me here?
As an intern.
An intern?
Alright, we’re getting somewhere.
I was hired as an intern!
So this is way harder than I anticipated, but the pay-off is great.
Of course making the cake is only step one.
Transporting the cake to the wedding venue, well that’s a waltz down another aisle that
I’m not quite ready for yet.
We made a cake.
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