I recently walked through the kitchen of the Fearrington House Restaurant – luckily my camera in hand – and stumbled across not only the most spectacular cake, but also an interesting moment when everyone was ever so carefully moving it. It made for an interesting picture.
Our cake designer, Jill Leckey, later described it as a 4-tiered, round cake with lemon, coconut, and marble cake inside, designed to feed around 150 people. It was destined for a wedding reception in the Barn that night.
Because the bride had asked for a spring-themed Fearrington wedding, Jill decided to adorn the cake with flowers so life-like I first thought they had just been plucked from our cutting gardens.
When asked, she said, “The flowers were made using gumpaste which is an elastic, edible, sugar dough. It dries very hard so that it holds the shape that you give it. Each flower is made by coloring the gum paste the desired color, rolling it, cutting it, and then shaping it. Once all of the parts to the flower are assembled, you can paint it whatever color you like. I use edible dusting powders to give the flowers a life-like appearance.”
How much time did it take to make the cake? “It is hard to say how many hours the cake took as a whole, but I started the sugar flowers over a month ago and they alone probably took over 50 hours to complete.”
Feast your eyes on some of Jill’s other inspiring (and time-consuming) cake creations in the photo gallery of our cakes page!