Ivory Rose Wedding Cake

This is my second wedding cake but the first one where I've made it all from scratch. 

The first stage was to make the bottom tier which was a fruit cake. I trawled the internet looking for a recipe that would make a moist and tasty fruit cake as I felt the recipe I'd been using wasn't good enough. I then came across a recipe called 'nans boiled fruit cake' which I obviously had to test to see if it was as yummy as it looked... It was :-) After making the wedding fruit cake I feed it occasionally with Havana Club Rum which had been specified by the bride. 

As the other two tiers were sponge I couldn't really do anything with them till nearer the time so I worked for hours on the roses. In the end I'd made 10 large open roses (some for backup in case of breakages on journey over) and 5 small roses and 5 buds. The roses were all non-edible but can be kept as a remembrance of the day. The tiny flowers that sit around the front of the cake were made the day before the wedding out of fondant so they would be edible. I thought once the ribbon and roses had been removed it would be quite a plain cake so I added them. 

About a week and half before the wedding I made the top two tiers so that I could freeze them and then get them out on the Tuesday, ice and marzipan them on the Wednesday and then on the Friday I covered them in the Ivory fondant. 

The middle tier is a chocolate cake that I found in one of the many recipe books I own, its called 'rich chocolate cake' and as before with the fruit cake it needed to be tested. All I can say is it tasted like brownies, Yummy.

The top tier I used the old favourite vanilla Madeira cake and I didn't need to quality check this recipe as I have tried it in the past.

Overall I am really pleased with this wedding cake as I had no idea how it was going to look or fit together until I got to the venue. I thought it best to keep all the parts separate to minimise the breakages. The only thing I was upset with was the fondant on the top two tiers was still a little bit soft so when I placed the roses on top it made a couple of little dints but other than that I was happy with it.