Bake it Up Baby Now!: Weddings, weddings... Part 1

Okay, so it's been a while since I've posted - a thousand pardons to all two of you who read this blog. Truthfully, the first half of pregnancy really packs a punch in my case: for a while there I couldn't even GO into a kitchen without wanting to be ill. In fact, I felt so terrible that I had to cancel almost all of my cake baking commitments (thanks to all of you for understanding).

Essentially the only commitments I didn't cancel were two weddings for old college friends: one for Adrienne (Keller) Eisenmenger and her wonderful new husband David, and the second wedding for Stephanie Wilson and Jared Manes. Adrienne and David were married on May 16th, and Stephanie and Jared's wedding were just married this past Saturday, June 6th. I'm going to recap both weddings and their cakes in two parts.

Here are a few photos of the process of creating Adrienne and David's cake:

First, I was still coming out of the morning sickness haze so Adrienne graciously agreed to purchase a pre-made wedding cake from Walmart and I would simply add the decoration. However, when I picked up the cake I was extremely disappointed: the cakes had big gaps in between each other, there were areas where the cake could be seen through the icing, and the cakes weren't even level. GAH!

So, I whipped up a batch of icing and started patching, smoothing, and making some repair on the cake.

Once it was in a somewhat better state, I started on the decoration: an assortment of fondant vines and a matching live green accents. My dear friend Ang came in from out of town and was staying the night because she was going to be doing wedding hair in the morning. Little did she know that she would also be assistant cake decorator as well. :) So we started cutting out the leaves using Wilton fondant leaf cutters... and kept cutting... and cutting...

A few hours and hundreds of leaves later...

WHEW! Done - I think this part was complete by 12:30am.
Thanks, Ang, for your help - it would have been much later if I didn't have you cutting those leaves!

The next morning, I added some more accents with kelly green buttercream icing...