Have your cake & eat it too - Part 1 My lovely cake

When you think of your wedding day you think of marrying the man or woman of your dreams. You think about who you will have as Bridesmaids and who he will pick as a best man. When planning your day the dresses, suits, flowers, decorations & venues will come to mind pretty easily. But if like me, the first wedding you ever attend is your own, it can be easy to get caught up in those the fantasy/excitement of the day and forget about another important part of your day, a tradition I think we should all follow, after all it involves cake!

Here's another opportunity flex your creativity muscles. If you want to do this on a budget it can be done but it's a bit of a challenge, involves a lot of shopping around unless you are lucky enough to know someone who can do it for you.

 To start with I will share with you a picture of my cake and discuss that. As this is a two part blog, part two will discuss some amazing ideas based on other cakes I saw & loved, hopefully giving you some ideas of what you can achieve and the inspiration to get your ideas flowing. 

Beautiful! This cake actually cost me nothing. I was lucky enough to have a mother who made the fruit cake  tier herself, and who paid a family friend to make the rest. The family friend literally only charged for the ingredients. I believe she purchased butterfly cutters to make icing butterflies but didn't charge us for those as she said she can re-use them. 

I purchased the butterfly/crystal cake topper from e-bay but my Mum reimbursed me for this purchase. The Cake topper was £16.95 via http://myworld.ebay.co.uk/crystal_wedding the item was very good quality for quite a low price, it was dispatched quickly and when it turned up I was so impressed that it looked as good as in the pictures, which we all know doesn't always happen with e-bay. I think the 100% positive feedback score says it all about this seller and it was the perfect topper for my cake.  The larger stocking butterflies, I genuinely can't remember who bought these, where from or for how much. But having looked on e-bay these appear to be readily available for around £2 for 6, and there are colour variations available so shop around.

Inspiration? - I had a fair idea of what I wanted in the sense that I didn't want white. Same as my dress, I knew the icing would have to be cream/ivory. I wanted a three tier cake, and at least one layer had to be a chocolate sponge (my favourite!). I wanted butterflies for decoration & red ribbon to tie it all back in with the colour theme. I knew I didn't want a bride & groom cake topper but a butterfly related cake topper. My mother and I looked at a few cakes in magazines, I visited a few websites and eventually me and Mum came across this cake it in a Marks & Spencer's catalogue & I knew that was what I wanted:

http://www.marksandspencer.com/Romantic-Pearl-Fruit-Wedding-White

At £200 I wasn't about to go & but the Marks version (sorry Marks!) so we discussed ways we could do this ourself, including asking the family friend to help! We decided to put red ribbons to kick some colour back in to it. I asked for bottom tier to be fruit, middle sponge, and top chocolate. I wanted butterflies spiralling the cake to bring back in the butterfly theme and then of course found the cake topper on E-bay. Our family friend did a fantastic job of bringing this to life don't you think?

I am estimating, as my Mum dealt with the finances for the cake, but in total I think my cake cost around £100 (including cake toppers, ribbons etc). I loved it, exactly how I pictured it. The only downside was I didn't want to cut it, it was just too pretty! We asked the Venue to slice our cake & serve it with coffee while our room was rearranged ready for the evening reception. This went down a treat with our guests!

Hope you liked the little insight to my cake, stay tuned for part two 

& 

As always,

Thanks for reading! xxx