After a full year of rocky road madness with completing a world record rocky road and the numerous trial runs before that it seemed only fitting to finish off the year doing what we know best for our own wedding cake. Having fitted in getting engaged and planning a large wedding in under 5 months this was the final piece of the cake to complete – quite literally! So the wednesday before the wedding we went about creating this beauty, the recipe was the easy bit as we were well practiced. Setting up multiple bain maries in the living room to melt chocolate, was quite a chocolate factory in the house – the smell was awesome!
The tricky part was the mould and what took most of the time, made from cardboard boxes carefully cut into triangles and then reconstructed with lots of duct tape to resemble something the Pharoah Tutumkhanum would have been proud of – a cardboard pyramid. Now the issue of filling it and being able to move it around after, I figured if it was put in a big catering pot inverted I could carry it around using the pot handles and this turned out a good plan. Although when we started filling it the sheer weight of the rocky road started bulging the sides so again had to think fast and screw timber pallet boards around the outside of the cake mould to keep the sides from bulging. We left it for a couple of days to cool down and harden in the back room whilst nervously awaiting the unveiling out of the box.
Then the joyful job of the ushers to transport the cake to the venue, a few broken backs later and a slight mishap where the cake hit the floor whilst in the mould much to my dismay! But thankfully I think the floor was damaged more than the cake, it was so heavy I couldn’t even see a dent in the cake. Unwrapped the cake, put ribbon around the bottom, custom wood carving sign on the top and cut out a hole at the top for a couple of lego wedded figurines to go in – wedding cake complete!
Conclusion
This was a lot of fun to make, build, present and eat! I’d totally recommend doing your own wedding cake, who needs a traditional fruit cake these days? Whilst it’s nice to go traditional it wasn’t us and we really enjoyed the building of it and people certainly enjoyed the eating!
How much did it cost? It came in at around £160, relatively speaking it was very cheap for the sheer quantity of ingredients and the amount of chocolate in it, it would have fed 600 people in total. You could certainly go smaller for a wedding cake and still look good but people were expecting something big from us so we felt obliged to deliver.
What would I change? Well nothing about the cake but maybe in hindsight don’t have a free bar at the wedding and also allow guests to cut their own slices with big construction saws – I’m surprised an ambulance didn’t have to be called out.