Ellie and Ruadhan’s wedding cake: a baking adventure on Sark

Ellie and her wedding cake

This is the first time I’ve ever made a wedding cake, and it was a real honour to be asked by Ellie, my oldest friend, to make the cake for her marriage to her wonderful partner Ruadhan. I’ve already posted the recipes for each tier as I tested it, which you can find by clicking on the links below:

• Chocolate raspberry cake with Earl Grey gold dust

• Carrot, orange and almond cake (flourless)

• Vegan lemon cake with camomile drizzle

But as well as putting up some photos of the final wedding cake, I thought I’d also blog about the adventures and challenges of baking a wedding cake on this scale and in a far-away place!

(If you're reading this on the homepage, click on 'see recipe' below to see pictures and read all about it…)

Ellie is vegan and so I’d decided as soon as she asked me that at least one tier would be vegan, so she could eat some of her own wedding cake!  That led me to decide that I should also make a wheat-free cake for any coeliacs attending the wedding, since I’ve got used to making gluten-free recipes for my sister.  Since I’d therefore be making three different batters, it made sense to do three different flavours.  Ruadhan’s favourite cake is carrot cake, so that had to be one of the tiers.  Chocolate just had to be one of the others – everyone loves chocolate cake, so I decided that would be the bottom, largest layer. As the vegan cake couldn’t have any icing (I’d chosen to make a fresh raspberry-rippled whipped cream for the chocolate cake, and a zesty orange mascarpone frosting for the carrot cake – neither of which are exactly vegan!) I decided to make a lemon drizzle cake, for the small top layer.  The whole thing would be brought together through decorations, but I wanted them all to be edible – you don’t want to have to pick paper flowers and wire out of your slice of cake, especially by the time you’ve had a few glasses of fizz!  So I bought some edible flowers online from Uncle Roys (which also sells amazing extracts that I can’t wait to try out – bergamot, green ginger, juniper, lavender…) and decided to try to make my own edible gold dust by making an Earl Grey flavoured caramel and grinding it up with a pestle and mortar.  

The wedding took place on the tiny Channel Island of Sark, an idyllic setting where much of her family comes from.  We stayed for a week, to bake the wedding cakes, help decorate the marquee, and have a bit of a holiday!  It felt a bit like stepping back in time to an English village in the 1950s - there are no cars on the island and only around 500 inhabitants, who all do several jobs and everyone knows everyone.  For example, Ellie’s uncle Jeremy is the Senechal, the lay judge of Sark, but was also driving a crane at the harbour lifting our luggage in and out of the boat we arrived on from Guernsey.  Sark has the most amazing starry skies at night, beautiful wild flowers everywhere, craggy rocks to climb, Victorian silver mines to explore and stunning beaches with smugglers coves.  It is magical. 

Me at the wedding ceremony

There were several challenges for me in making the cake on this beautiful, but tiny island.  Normally, I bake for pleasure and there is no pressure – as long as it tastes good, not much else matters to me, and even then, if it goes wrong you can always start again.  Not so this time!  Firstly, it’s a wedding cake – it needs to look amazing as well as taste good.  Secondly, there was not much room for error – I had a finite amount of ingredients (and in fact, on the morning of the wedding when I was decorating the cake, we ran out of raspberries as some of them had gone bad and couldn’t be used.  Jamie, another friend attending the wedding and staying with us dashed out on his bike and returned with the last handful of raspberries on the island, having been to all of its two shops!)  So Ruadhan ordered me all the ingredients in advance so they’d arrive on the island in time for me to begin baking.  The dairy produce was all Sark’s own though – and I have never tasted cream or butter like it – I wanted to eat the butter in slices like cheese, it was so rich and yellow and salty.  (We ended up bringing some home, and I’m not sure how we’ll go back to ordinary butter when it runs out!)  Thirdly, as I was baking it in the kitchen of a holiday cottage, I didn’t have all the mod cons I now take for granted (like my amazing KitchenAid stand mixer that Lu gave me for Christmas a few years ago).  I’d have to do this old-school.  Hand held whisk, wooden spoons and a small oven.  I packed a whole hold-all bag full of cake tins, the cake stand, cooling racks, palette knife, cake tester, spatula, weighing scales, mixing bowl, sieve, plus paper flowers to decorate the cake stand with, and edible rose petals to decorate the cakes with.  A customs officer would have been a bit surprised if they’d decided to check our bags!     

The cake, Ruadhan, Ellie and me 

So on the Thursday, our first full day on the island, we spent the day at the Den, where Ellie and Ru stayed, baking the cakes.  Lu was my glamorous assistant, who I put to work greasing and lining cake tins, grating lemon zest, cracking eggs and endlessly washing up!  The 12 inch bottom tier, the chocolate cake, was the first to go into the oven.  But then a problem: the oven rack had a lip towards the back which stuck upwards and meant the cake tin wouldn’t lie flat.  There was no way of turning the rack upside down as it had to slide into wiggly grooves in the sides of the oven.  Luckily, Ellie’s cousin Tim appeared, took it out of the hot oven and to his dad’s workshop, where he was able to bend the metal to flatten it. First crisis averted! With the first cake in, we sat waiting nervously in the sunshine outside with cups of tea, not wanting to open the oven door too soon and letting cold air in.  When we finally decided it was time to sneak a peek, we realised that as the cake tin was so large, it touched the front and back walls of the oven and was burning those edges, while the cake in the middle was still liquid batter.  From then on, we had to risk opening the oven door every few minutes to twist the tin a few degrees so it was evenly baked all round.  I confess that Lu  gently scraped off the burnt bits when the cake came out of the oven – not ideally what you want to be doing to someone’s wedding cake, but luckily we’d caught it in time and the damage was only very superficial.  We decided to use that as the middle layer, where it wouldn’t matter so much, and sliced the top off to make one thinner layer.  The next 12 inch chocolate cake that went in the oven, having learnt our lesson, came out perfectly and made two lovely thick layers for the top and bottom of the cake.  Four layers would, it turned out when we assembled it, been too tall for the cake stand anyway!

The chocolate cake with raspberry whipped Sark cream and chocolate Chambord ganache

The rest of the baking went without a hitch, until we had to decide how and when to transport it back to Beau Sejour, the wedding reception venue, and conveniently also the house where Lu and I were staying.  Ellie and Ruadhan came home from their afternoon meeting Ellie’s dad and step mum who’d travelled to Sark from America, who they were cooking a meal for that evening.  I didn’t want to leave their kitchen covered in cakes while they tried to cook and eat around them, so we decided to brave transporting them home.  At this stage each layer of cake was laid out on a cooling rack or chopping board, so the four of us, the bride and groom and Lu and I, carefully carried them back to our house through country lanes – and managed not to drop any, despite Lu being very much a driver and not a great pedestrian (known to regularly fall over her feet!).  Ru braved it on a bike, with a great box full of the remaining ingredients – copious containers of cream and mascarpone and oranges and berries – very impressive!

The lemon and camomile drizzle (vegan) cake

The next morning, I woke up and got straight to work in the tiny kitchen we had. Although other guests were joining us at the house that weekend, we still had the place to ourselves for a few more hours, so I was keen to unload the fridge groaning with icing ingredients to make room for people to store their food!  I grated lots of orange zest for the mascarpone frosting, but the ‘waste not, want not’ ethos of the island must already have made an impression on me as it seemed such an extravagance to have ordered all these oranges just for their zest.  I sliced them thinly and placed them in a saucepan with sugar (we’d brought some with us for coffee, only to discover previous guests must have all come prepared with the same idea and our cupboard was now stocked full of sugar!), keeping an eye on it bubbling away as I worked.  I then carefully lifted out the candied orange slices and left them to dry on a sheet of greaseproof paper on the window sill.  I used these to add the cornucopia of fruit and flowers I decorated the cake with the next day.  The remaining orange syrup in the pan I added to the mascarpone instead of icing sugar to sweeten the frosting.  I then assembled the carrot cake in its tier of the cake stand, layering three cakes with the mascarpone frosting and blueberries.  This sat in the fridge to set overnight.  

The carrot, orange and almond (wheat-free) cake, with orange mascarpone frosting

I spent the rest of the afternoon making tissue-paper pom-pom decorations for the marquee, as Lu patiently ironed all the bunting I’d brought with us that I’d originally made for our wedding in 2010 (since used several times over for other friends weddings and celebrations).  Ruadhan’s Irish clan arrived on the afternoon boat and came and helped hang the decorations with other friends and family.  Suddenly, within half an hour, the marquee was ready, and we’d all got to know each other!  Off to the pub to meet the rest of the crowd and give Ellie and Ru a big cwtch before the big day tomorrow.

The cake in the marquee

On Saturday, the ceremony didn’t start til 2pm, so I’d left the rest of the cake to finish assembling.  The top two tiers were done, but I hadn’t wanted to make the raspberry cream too early, as when I tested it the week before I discovered the raspberries leaked their colour into the edges of the cream, which was pretty the day it was made but looked a bit crusty by the following day.  So I got to work first thing in the morning whipping lots of cream by hand (luckily Sark cream is almost as thick as Cornish clotted cream to start with, so this didn’t take too much arm ache!).  As I was making the ganche, Jamie and Lu appeared and made coffee, and offered to help.  Jamie washed the raspberries and Lu helped me layer the tiers of chocolate cake (quite a delicate operation with cakes so large, one that definitely required more than two hands!) with the whipped cream and arrange the raspberries on top.  However, Jamie soon discovered that about a third of them had over-ripened and begun to fur.  He jumped on his bike and headed to the village shops, only to discover there was only a single punnet of raspberries left on the island. He returned with those and some extra blueberries.  I decided that rather than decorating the chocolate cake just with Earl Grey gold dusted raspberries (as in my original test), I would decorate the top of each cake with a mixture of blueberries, raspberries and blackberries, along with my candied orange slices and edible flower petals, and sprinkled the Earl Grey gold dust over the whole cake rather than dipping individual raspberries in it for the chocolate cake.  This in the end had a more unifying effect, as if I’d planned it!

Ruadhan and Ellie cutting the cake

The next, risky bit was assembling the cake stand.  It has three metal poles which each skewers through the middle of a whole cake to screw into the stand above.  We decided it was best to do this by skewering upwards through the cake from the hole beneath it, so we didn’t need to move the carefully layered cake to align it from above.  This meant I carefully held the cake stand overhanging the edge of the table, while Lu sat on the floor beneath it, poking a hole through the middle (using the dismantled central pole from a caffetiere plunger as I’d forgotten to bring skewers!)  Once that nervousness was over, the three of us each carried a tier downstairs, through the back garden and into the marquee.  Here we carefully screwed the cake stand together, trying not to make a mess of the silk table runners upon which it sat!  Finally, the three tiers were together, and all that remained was for me to decorate it with the petals, berries, candied oranges and Earl Grey gold dust. 

The queue for the cake

As soon as it was done, I rushed to change into my dress, and dashed to Ellie’s Den to make flower girl head-dresses and help Ellie get ready.  The three day whirlwind was over – and time for the wedding to begin!  We walked through the woods – which as a child I would definitely have thought of as an enchanted forest where fairies resided – and came to a beautiful sunny clearing, with the most stunning views over the sea.  It was a magical ceremony, followed by a fantastic party back at Beau Sejour.  The cake was a hit – a huge queue formed as Ellie and Ruadhan cut it, and the whole thing was demolished before you knew it.  A mark of success I think! 

The demolished cake