The Family Cake

I love cake. I love to make cakes. I love to look through recipe books at cakes. I do cake well.

In particular, Battenburg, Fruit, Victoria Sponge, Madeira, Chocolate, Lemon drizzle, Cherry and Almond, Caffe and Walnut and don't get me started on eccles cakes. I would struggle to choose my favourite.

This became a slight problem when choosing 'the' wedding cake, I hit a wall of, well, Cake. It would have been easy if we had had a favourite but we didn't. I was struggling to narrow down my list from all favourites to just one. In the process becoming ever so slightly irrational in my devotion to entire recipe books. In the end I decided to go with tradition which led me uncompromisingly in the direction of the fruitcake. A proud mix traditionally seeped in hours of love and care, but not Norwegian, which was the other ingredient in our cultural bowl. 

In the meantime happy to find a non edible distraction, I set to work on the topper. I had found a wonderful shop selling solid wooden peg dolls called Goose Grease, on Etsy, and decided to buy some to immortaise our family for the top of the cake. Within a week, and for a very decent price, two wooden families arrived in Denmark ready to be painted. Being me I didn't follow the instructions and jumped straight in to painting. There followed one of my favourite projects from the whole summer ( although I think next time I would not paint the faces which is what they recommended anyway on Goose Grease)

The new family needed something to sit on and we still hadn't decided on a cake. In the end, we compromised. We would indeed have a traditional fruit cake but it would be a small one, iced in white with our wooden family a top. Alongside the fruitcake we would have a tower of cupcakes, vanilla and lemon, iced with buttercream to resemble the hydrangea that were in my bouquet.

Which is where the master, Carolyn Rafferty Stewart of Stewarts Cakes came in to save the day. Carolyn works tirelessly within the ex-pat community here in Copenhagen to create countless beautiful cakes to suit all tastes and all ages. For our wedding she produced a glorious tower of cupcakes that tasted as good as they looked, as well as our beautifully elegant, white iced family fruitcake. They were to us the perfect cake's.

I do still love all cake, but there are now two that stand out all on their own due to the memories that fill their every crumb. 

My new favourites.

Thank you Carolyn.