Just for today, I’m taking a break from shooting weddings. This time, I want to check how other suppliers work and prepare for their client’s “BIG DAY”. Fortunately, I was blessed to visit one of the well-known wedding cake suppliers, Judy Uson. She is known for making beautiful sugar flowers and wedding cakes.
The lead time for the production of the cake takes 7-10 days which involves procurement of supplies and the preparation of the “dummy cakes”
FYI. Not all the cakes that you see in a wedding are made up of 100% “real” cakes. Some of these layers are just made up of styrofoam inside, especially if the client orders a very tall cake. Most of the clients prefer not to cut the whole cake since these cakes are often used for centerpiece during the reception.
Here’s a sample of the very exquisite sugar flowers made by Judy Uson.
10 days before the event:
Judy and her team are preparing the sugar flowers already… For this wedding, they had to finish 700 flowers of different sizes…
The first 2 to 3 days of the production involved cutting and shaping the different flower petals and buds and drying them.
6 Days before the event:
Sugar flowers were individually colored to the right shade to match the color theme of the wedding.
The dummy cakes were put together 4 days in advance of the wedding date. That means the cakes were covered in fondant, stenciled and decorated with sugar flowers.
10 hours before the reception:
Judy and her team are finishing up the details of the cakes.
Judy and her assistant carefully removes the stencil to maintain symmetry of the pattern.
Here’s the cake after being stencilled.
8 hours before the reception:
The real cake was baked the day before the event and now its time to take it out of the oven…
Making the fondant to cover the cake was a long and tedious process that is similar to making dough.
7 hours before the reception:
Once the cake is cooled, it is covered with the fondant.
With the whole cake covered with fondant, decorating them was the next step.
The layers of cake were alternately decorated with stenciled icing and meticulous icing embroidery.
When done, the cake was then studded with rhinestones and Swarovski crystals to give the cake a sparkling shimmering effect. Imagine 1000 pieces of crystals carefully affixed in the cake.
6 hours before the reception:
The cake was then assembled at the kitchen to see how it would look like at actual venue.
4 hours before the reception: (2 pm)
The cake has arrived at the wedding reception.
The cake was brought down from van and assembled together with the glass pillars with dangling crystal curtains.
The staffs of Judy are doing some finishing touches.
3 hours before the reception: (3 pm)
Judy’s team are now gluing the glass pillars to make it stable for the cake layers.
Since this cake was 6 ft tall, the crew had to bring in a ladder for the top layers of the cake.
2 hours before the reception: (4pm)
It took almost two hours just to put the cake altogether and do the finishing touches and decorations of the cake at the reception. Just enough time to clean up and pack-up the setting up materials.
Here’s the Final Output of the 6 ft tall cake.
I never thought that wedding cakes can be as complex to prepare and assemble. Watching Judy and her team construct the cake from scratch gave me a new appreciation of wedding cakes as to how tough and intricate its details can be.
A photo of Judy Uson with her 6 ft tall cake masterpiece.
This is Dominic Barrios, reporting for Weddings at Work (W@W) Assignment.
no comments