Flowered Wedding Cake and Hawkeyes Groom Cake

Wedding Cake with Gum Paste Flowers

 9 -10 -11 was the wedding date for Eric and Debby L.  She asked Joy and I to make her wedding cake and she designed it herself.  She gave me a simple drawing and wanted the flowers to match the bridesmaids bouquets.  There were roses, mums,  hydrangeas, leaves, and gold balls in the bouquets.  We wanted to get a sooner start on the flowers, but since we were both dealing with poison ivy, we waited to get that healed up first. It was great to find a few 50% off sales at Michael's to help with purchasing some of our ingredients, colors, paints, etc.  We got started about a week before making gum paste flowers.  We enjoy making gum paste  

 flowers, but found it difficult to get the right color.  Gum paste dries SO much lighter than when it is fresh!!   We actually found that we had to make the color almost black for it to dry the colors you see.  We also had a hard time getting it the right shade.  Although the top of the color container shows the right color, the color that you get from the bottle is VERY different!  We had to add a LOT of red to try to get the color we wanted, and still think we could have added more red possibly!  We were not 100% please with the burgandy/red color, but it was close enough.  The flowers and leaves were made with gum paste, the gold balls are made with fondant and colors with edible airbrush paint.  She requested marble and white cake for the four layers of the main cake. 

 Another thing we learned from this cake is that gum paste flowers take much time and patience!!  We spent about 4 days on the flowers.  Friday was baking day, and the Saturday of the wedding, we covered them with fondant, stacked them, and decorated them.  They also asked for a monogram, so we picked colors to compliment the cake.  The oval base under the letters was done by Joy's Cake CriCut.  It took a few tries to get the right size!! 

You can see a few close up pictures of the flowers and more pictures on our facebook page.

Eric designed the groom's cake.  His college team is the Iowa Hawkeyes and he wanted their football field for the cake.  We started looking online to see how other people made football field cakes.  We learned quickly that most women made these cakes and they were misshaped and not to scale.

We felt pretty much on our own and discussed several options to making a football field. 

Iowa Hawkeye Cake

We took the measurements for a football field and reduced them down to the size of our cake.  We baked a chocolate cake and covered the whole cake in green fondant, then put strips of fondant in two tones for the field.  The end zones are black fondant with yellow letters made with gum paste on Joy's CriCut machine.  We had to hand make the hawkeye emblem.  The lines and numbers are piped with white butter cream, and the one thing we would like to revise if we do another football field.  Green butter cream is piped with a grass tip around the edges of the cake.

Thanks for looking and please leave us a comment!