Baking the world by storm!: Biggest wedding cake so far...

My cousin Selina asked me a couple of months ago if I would make a wedding cake for her big day, I have made a wedding cake before which was a 3 tier cake (10inch vanilla sponge, 8inch carrot cake and 6inch vanilla sponge), but she wanted something bigger! The request was for a 14inch fruit cake, 12inch chocolate sponge, and a 10inch vanilla sponge.....

Now this may not seem like a big ask but this would be the biggest cake I've made to date, and firstly I needed to measure my oven!! Safe in the knowledge that my oven was up to the job, I mixed up the fruit cake 3 weeks prior to the wedding - I used my favourite fruit cake recipe from my Nigella Lawson 'Christmas' book, which also happens to be the recipe I use for my Christmas cakes! Because the cake was so big, I was worried about the edges scorching as I knew it would need to be in the oven for a considerable amount of time (5hrs 30mins in the end!!) so not only did I double line the tin with brown paper, but I then triple lined that with baking parchment just to be on the safe side.

As soon as the cake was out of the oven, I used further Bourbon to brush the top of the cake to make sure it didn't dry out, before double wrapping the whole thing (tin included!) in foil and allowing it to cool completely (the cooling took much longer than I expected - nearly 36hrs!). Once completely cooled, the cake was removed from the tin, fed with some more Bourbon and then double wrapped in foil again. It wasn't unwrapped again until the Wednesday before the big day when I covered the cake in a layer of marzipan ready to be iced.

The middle tier chocolate sponge was a recipe from James Martin 'Desserts' - another of my well thumbed recipe books, and the top tier was tried and tested vanilla sponge from Nigella's 'Domestic Goddess' book. I made these the Thursday evening before the wedding, filled them and covered them in frosting before leaving them in the fridge overnight to set.

All three tiers were iced with white sugarpaste and polished smooth. Selina wanted the cake to be simply decorated, so it was left with just the white sugarpaste and decorated with gold ribbon to compliment her colour scheme for the day.