Surprise Inside Wedding Cake

I decided the day before my brother-in-law's wedding that I would make him a small surprise wedding cake. I had been Googling cakes as usual, and I came across a very interesting recipe on Epicurious, taken from food blogger Amanda Rettke's new cookbook Surprise-Inside Cakes.

3 batches of cake and four hours later, I finally had all the layers I needed to assemble this cake! The layers are easier to carve if they're chilled until firm, so I stuck them in the fridge while I whipped up a batch of Swiss meringue buttercream.

6 rainbow layers

I love how smooth and creamy Swiss meringue buttercream is, without being sickly sweet like the traditional American buttercream that's made with icing sugar, butter and shortening. Swiss meringue buttercream is made with egg whites and granulated sugar, boiled over a double boiler to 160C and then whipped until fluffy and cool before butter is added into it. It can be easily flavoured with anything (in this case I used clear vanilla extract to try to keep it as white as possible) and it pipes like a dream. I could eat spoonfuls of this stuff.

luscious Swiss meringue buttercream

The cake was carved, stacked, filled and frosted, simply decorated with buttercream rosettes and a bunch of fuchsia hydrangeas. Honestly, by the time I was done frosting, I only had enough buttercream to pipe a border of roses on top of the cake. The hydrangeas did a nice job of filling the empty space in the middle. 

  

6" tall, 4-layer, 8" round vanilla wedding cake

modeling the cake on the coffee table

When the bride and groom left the ballroom to change up for their second march in, I snuck the cake in! After the 2nd march-in, the yum seng and the thank you speech, the couple finally got to sit down again. The bride was the first to notice the cake! She was like where'd this come from!? Haaa. Surprise success!  

It's not tradition to cut a Real wedding cake here. Normally the couple just poses for a photo of the "cake cutting" with a decorated 5-tier styrofoam wedding cake!

cutting the Real cake

There was another surprise waiting for them when the bride and groom cut into the wedding cake...a rainbow heart surprise in the middle! I was anxious as to how this would turn out because I've never made a "surprise inside" cake before and one never knows what it'll look like until the cake is cut! It's a heart alright, but I need to work on my carving skills. The "V" part of the heart is a bit too deep. Not bad for a first try though, I think.

surprise rainbow heart!

They were pretty proper about feeding each other cake. I've seen weddings where the bride and groom smash cake into each others' faces!

feeding cake to each other

Mmm. Moist vanilla-almond white wedding cake, with a rainbow surprise inside! Congrats to my bro-in-law and my new sis-in-law!

You may be wondering what I did with the plenty of scraps that the making of this cake generated. That will be the subject of a future post! Stay tuned :)

PS, my sis had her baby on July 17th at 9:09 pm, 3 weeks early!!! even before the baby shower cookies were delivered!! Haaa!