The big day is finally here: my baby sister's wedding day. And to think that we only had her bridal shower a few months ago! We have all been super busy preparing. She's one of those DIY people so it's great that we have such an awesome team of family and friends to make her dream wedding into reality. From assembling the bouquets to making giant paper flowers for the backdrop; from baking all the desserts and wedding cake to tying ribbons on the wedding favours, from decorating the ballroom and making last minute dollar-store runs to buy tea lights, everyone pitched in to do their part and helped to make the wedding, an awesome day to remember! Now, sit back, relax and have something to munch on while you read through this super-long post!
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| Wedding Cake & Cupcakes |
Naturally, I volunteered to make the desserts, macaron wedding favours and the wedding cake! My sister wanted a cupcake tower, topped with a small cake. For the dessert table, I made cake pops, chocolate Oreo pyramids, more cupcakes and macarons. It was a two week-long baking marathon and I enjoyed every minute of it!
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| desset table goodies! |
I asked my sis and her hubby what flavours they wanted for the cupcakes. She picked lemon-raspberry and he picked salted caramel (actually he picked carrot, but my sister vetoed it). Since these were gonna be wedding cupcakes, I wanted to make them fancy! So I came up with: Limoncello cupcakes filled with Limoncello-raspberry curd & brown sugar-hazelnut cupcakes filled with gooey salted caramel.
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| Limoncello-raspberry curd filling |
I took my go-to lemon cupcake recipe and substituted nearly all the milk for Limoncello (close to 1 cup, people!!). The raspberry curd filling had a healthy dose of Limoncello in it as well, and as if that wasn't enough to pack a punch, the cupcakes were frosted with Limoncello Swiss meringue buttercream, and had a pipette shot of straight-up Limoncello on it!
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| fancy ruffle-y frosting |
I mean, the wedding reception had a toonie bar already, but these quadruple Limoncello-raspberry cupcakes had enough booze in it to give the guests a head start! I don't think it was a coincidence that the liquor store only had the larger bottle of Limoncello in stock. They probably knew just how much we were gonna use for this wedding! (and all those shots that we kicked back while baking, of course ;P)
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| don't forget the Limoncello pipette shots! |
Anyway, the brown-sugar-hazelnut cupcakes were the same recipe that I made for when my other sister got married a couple years ago, but a little fancier this time, filling them with my homemade gooey salted caramel. For the salted caramel frosting, I mixed in a generous amount of salted caramel into the Swiss meringue buttercream and threw in an extra pinch of sea salt for good measure. Mmm oh yea. That salty-sweet combo is a good one. I topped them with a few gold dragees for a little more fancy.
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| crushed hazelnut crust |
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| salted caramel cupcakes, all ready to party |
The cake pops were teal velvet cake pops, rolled in teal and mint green sanding sugar and accented with a gold fondant rose. Why teal velvet? Well, actually I had planned to make red velvet but forgot to bring red food colouring with me. I had plenty of teal, since that was the wedding colour scheme, so teal velvet it was!
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| teal velvet cake ball army |
I used a silicone mould to make the fondant roses, and then I painted them gold with Rolkem Super Gold mixed with a little vodka, and stuck them onto the cake pops with a little bit of melted chocolate. I love how fancy they look with the gold metallic striped straws!
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| fondant roses in production |
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| prototypes! |
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| chocolate-covered Oreo pyramids |
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| teal ombré chocolate pyramids with a touch of gold |
Now about those macaron favours. Usually I make French macarons, but I read online that Italian macarons dry quicker, and since I didn't have the luxury of aircon and didn't want to wait an hour for each tray of macarons to dry, I decided to go the Italian route and mess with the hot sugar syrup.
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| fresh outta the oven |
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| yummy pistachio ganache filling |
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| decadent key-lime Godiva white chocolate ganache |
I'm not sure if it saved me any time, since each tray still needed to dry for 40 mins! It was a week-long macaron production process, holed up in my sister's place, churning out 432 of these babies, not including the "sample" ones that ended up in our bellies!
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| feeeeeet! |
For the fillings I made pistachio ganache, key lime-Godiva white chocolate liquer, mint chocolate and chocolate hazelnut. Most of the macaron ingredients flew with me from Singapore, including the decadent pistachio paste & white chocolate callets from Baking Blocks, which I used to make the pistachio ganache! It was definitely a team effort packaging these little babies into transparent gift boxes, and then tying teal tulle ribbon around each package!
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| waiting patiently for these babies to dry |
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| mint chocolate ganache filling |
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| go, macaron favour assembly team, go! |
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| macaron wedding favours |
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| chunks of juicy, ripe, fresh mangoes |
I even had extra to make a small unplanned cake for the rehearsal dinner a couple nights before! I decorated the cake in rustic teal ombré, and painted on some streaks of gold. To top the cake, I ordered this fabulous fully customized caricature cake topper off of Etsy. The topper only arrived in the late afternoon before the wedding, causing a little stress, but thank goodness it was delivered just in time!
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| Awesome customized caricature cake topper! |
My sister laughed til her stomach hurt cuz the resemblance is just uncanny!! And the groom is wearing a Superman shirt underneath, which is perfect cuz he's really into Superman stuff. My sister even got him Superman cuff links to wear for the wedding!
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| rustic wedding cake |
I actually piped some buttercream flowers to use on top of the cake as well, but I wasn't able to arrange them on the cake and pipe the leaves and baby's breath and flower buds on the spot at the venue cuz we only had two hours to set up the whole ballroom, decorate the VIP table, string up the lights & paper flowers for the backdrop and put together the dessert table! In fact, I didn't even get to take a pic of the buttercream flowers (they're hidden away on that plate in the corner here in the pic below). So anyway, I went with topping the cake with some fresh blooms: Hydrangeas, Dahlias & Gerberas.
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| glorious wedding cake & cupcakes tower |
I drove an hour and a half the night before to pick up the acrylic 6-tier cupcake stand for the wedding. I had brought the Wilton Towering Tiers Cake Stand that we used for my other sister's wedding with me, but I realized that I only brought 4 of the 6 tiers and it just wasn't tall enough to give that dramatic flair that my sister wanted (even though she said it was fine... but I wanted it to be the best it could be, so off to Mission it was!!)
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| teal, gold & white wedding cake & cupcakes |
The acrylic stand was well worth the drive! The only thing was that after assembling all 6 tiers and placing the cake on top, the whole thing was a bit wobbly. With all the people walking around the cake table to get to the buffet, and the bridal party climbing up and down from the VIP table, it would've been a disaster waiting to happen. So we decided to bring the cake down and put hydrangeas on the top tier instead. Still a little wobbly, but at least those cupcakes weren't gonna come crashing down. We placed tea lights all around to make it more romantic. In fact, I had brought a dreamy mint green tulle table skirting with me, handmade by One and Only Gallery, to place on the cake table, but we just had no time to fix it on!
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| all set up! |
The cake pops, cupcakes, chocolate-covered Oreo pyramids and extra macaron wedding favours were arranged on a small dessert table, supplemented by 3 large vases full of Lindt chocolate truffles. The dark chocolate coconut, milk chocolate coconut and champagne truffles were wrapped in the perfect colours to match the wedding! One of my sister's best friends even made the cool graffiti-style sign which we used to accent the table.
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| boom. dessert table done! |
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| look at all these teal and gold babies! |
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| romantic teal ombré chocolate pyramids, with a touch of gold |
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| fancy teal velvet cake pops |
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| ...aaaaaand 15 mins later.... |
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| fancy filled cupcakes |
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| my 3 monsters getting ready to party |
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| with the newlyweds, Mr. & Mrs. H! |
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| my Gorgeous sista! |
A huuuuge congratulations to my sister and her husband! I am so glad to have been a part of this memorable event. Happy Wedding Day, Eunice & Trevor!! #eunicetrevor4ever!! ("Treasure" **puke, puke**) Yaaaaaaaaaaaaam-SENG!
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| even the skies couldn't to rain on their parade! |
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| Congrats, Eunice & Trevor!! |
Thank you for such an awesome dessert spread!!! You made the day extra special and extra tasty too!!!!
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