Let them eat cake!

I like cake. A lot. And so does my fiancé. In fact, I'm fairly certain that he is more excited about the cake than any other part of the wedding.

For as long as I can remember, he has said he wants a chocolate wedding cake, and I'm happy with that (who doesn't like chocolate cake?). Neither of us like fruitcake, so that was out anyway. I started of looking at some very chocolatey cakes - here's a few of my favourites:

Yum! They all look delicious, but the more we looked, the more we decided that a chocolate covered cake and a (hopefully) hot, August day might not mix well. The last thing we want is to get to our reception and find that the cake has melted all over the place!

I also didn't think that a chocolate cake fit in well with my idea of a bright, colourful, possibly purple and green cake. So we decided that we could have a chocolate sponge cake on the inside, with royal icing on the outisde, which would stand up to heat slightly better. Best of both worlds!

We knew that we wanted a whole cake, rather than cupcakes. We knew we wanted at least 3 tiers and we knew we wanted something different and interesting.

And I found a picture of this cake and everything fell into place:

Is this not the most amazing cake you have ever seen? I love it so much and the fact that it's in our wedding colours is a huge bonus!

We decided we would get rid of the stuff on the top, so we can have our bride and groom cake toppers up there, and we are undecided whether or not to keep the green bow.

But now that we know which cake we want, the next issue is whether to DIY it, or get a professional to do it. Obviously we are all about the money saving, so DIYing it is appealing. But then again, I have very little experience of decorating cakes.

I had a long discussion today with my mum and my aunt, where we looked up various different ways to make such a wedding cake. We have come to the conclusion that since each tier is quite deep, we would need about 4 layers of cake per tier.

We also decided that we need to put those support stick things (the name of which escapes me right now) into each tier to make sure the weight of the top tiers didn't make the bottom ones collapse.

After that, we decided it would be easy enough to cover the whole thing in white icing and use coloured icing to cut out and apply the different shapes. Of course, none of us have ever done this before, so it's quite possible that we are delusing ourselves.

We decided that we'll have to make a mini replica first, to see how difficult it is. I am also going to try to contact some local bakeries and get a quote for a professionally made cake. If we can get it for under £200 I think I'd be tempted to pay for it and save us all the hassle!

Now, because I like cake so much, here's some other cakes we liked the look of:

Ok - how cool does that Beatles cake look?!?  And a cake where the bride and groom are fighting off zombies with chainsaws...? Freaking amazing!
Zombies scare the bejeezus outta me, and I'm pretty sure that if they were to attack on our wedding day, Karl would stay and fight them off with me, using chainsaws.
And if that's not true love, then I don't know what is...