A huge challenge came in when my sis's friend, Wenqing, wanted to order a 21st birthday cake for her husband's sister. The challenge here is she wants a 2-tier cake to cater to 20 odd ppl. At first I'm undecided whether I should take up the order as I have never done a real 2-tier cake before (with real cakes i mean) and I do not want to mess up people's party with a "cannot make it" cake. I know how important a 21st birthday party means to someone (i've been there not very long ago) and cake is of course the highlight and most important part of the party. What if I can't deliver the cake on that day? What if the cake cannot stand and collapse? But then again, I pushed aside these "what ifs" and took up the challenge. And special thanks to Wenqing who put her trust in me and provided lots of opinions and suggestions as to how she wants the cake to look like, the colour theme and stuffs, I like how she contributed a lots of ideas and the constructive discussions we had and how the final product came by with lots of contributions from her. I hope she do feel a sense of engagement too where she had a part in the final product.
It all started with this drawing that she sent me where she wanted a 3-tier retro theme cake at first. This is really too much a challenge for me for my 1st attempt thus I suggested a 2-tier cake with cupcakes at the side to cater to the amount of ppl at the party.
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| She is really good at drawing and the use of colours. |
Besides this drawing, she sent me a few other cakes online which is more of a retro theme and provided me with more ideas. Therefore, I tried my hands on conceptualizing the design and drawing it out for the first time. Pardon my poor drawing skills.
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| Wanted to have circles and rounds for the retro theme. |
Now that the design part is done, the harder part now is the assembling of the cakes. I heard theory before and I have done it on dummy before (Ulyss's princess cake), but to do it on real cakes, I'm not sure if it will work on my first attempt. Therefore, I decided to try it out a week before the actual delivery date and also to let her comment and do any changes to the design.
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| My first 2-tier cake attempt. |
So the process of making a 2-tier cake goes like this. I baked a 8" and 10" cake respectively and bought pillars and base to support the top tier cake. Although my choc fudge cake is a dense cake that is good to hold any designs, I'm not confident that it is able to hold another cake on its own. So to play it safe, I inserted three pillars into the bottom tier cake and then transferred the top tier cake onto it. And I bought silver spray to spray it on the cake and the ribbon as she wanted silver as part of the colour theme. The attempt was successful and the cake is able to hold and not collapse! And therefore, I'm more confident to work on the actual product after some feedback and changes given from Wenqing.
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| The final product! |
She did not want orange to be in the colour scheme and therefore orange is taken out. And also she preferred small disco balls to flowers so I changed the design to disco ball where I bought glitters to brush on them to make them shine. I realised the ribbon is way too big for the first one so I made a smaller one for this cake which lies nicely on top of the top tier cake. And of course, we can't miss the 21 on top of the cake to show that it is a 21st birthday cake!
I'm glad she loved it in the end and the cake was a success! It was really a big project for me and a huge milestone for my cake decorating journey. With this success attempt, I'm more confident to try out more two-tier cakes in the future! Thanks Wenqing for giving me this opportunity and also for the patience and generous feedbacks given to perfect this cake!
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