Last Saturday was my cousin Emily's wedding. It was a beautiful ceremony, and it was great to catch up with everyone on my mom's side of the family. I also got to make the cake! The couple had a tropical theme and requested lots of blue, some bubble-sugar coral, and some sea creatures made of white chocolate.
Below is a closer look at the bubble sugar. This stuff is so much fun to make! It is incredibly simple, but at the same time, slightly dangerous -- molten sugar is not something you want touching your skin. Anyway, once you pour it and let it set up, you break it into pieces that look like shards of glass. (FYI, they are just as sharp.)
I made one clear batch of bubble sugar and tinted the other batch green. In the end, I decided to go mostly with the clear, because I think it looked better. If you are interested in making this, here is the recipe I used:
http://candy.about.com/od/hardcandyrecipes/r/bubblesugar.htm
Be careful!!! One time in pastry school, I got a tiny bit of molten sugar on my hand, and I had the scar for years and years. It also hurt like a mutha.
Bottom tier: chocolate cake with chocolate filling
Middle and top tiers: lemon cake with lemon filling
Frosting: white buttercream with lots of airbrush to get the blue colors. Sure, I could have just tinted all of the buttercream blue, but I didn't want to. I think that when you use food coloring in the quantities necessary for color that intense, the buttercream stops tasting like buttercream and starts tasting like blue food coloring.
Normally for a cake like this, I would prefer to use colored fondant. It is much safer, as there are serious "bleeding" issues involved with using food coloring on buttercream. But the bride was very against the idea of fondant, so I was determined to make it work.
Sea creatures: I just used a basic candy mold from the craft store. I used white and dark chocolate swirled together to get a more realistic effect.
Coral accents: bubble sugar
Ribbon: each tier actually got two white ribbons wrapped around it. The first one was used to soak up the blue grease, and the second one was for show.
…I took this picture myself:
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