Chocolate on Chocolate DIY Wedding Cake

Chocolate wedding cake - Yum!
Photo: Sunlitway Photography

Well, here it is! The chocolate on chocolate (and another on choclate if you count the curls) wedding cake. I was afraid the Cornelli Lace (the squiggly decoration on the sides) might not show up in brown on brown but it's absolutely beautiful! And oh so yummy, too.

The bottom layer was milk chocolate and the middle layer was Devil's Food. The milk chocolate was a little crumblier than I like so I would go with Devil's Food for both were I to make a chocolate wedding cake again. For the frosting, I modified the recipe on the Hershey's cocoa container. Instead of using all butter, I substituted half Crisco to give it extra stability. Then I mixed in more powdered sugar to get a stiffer consistency for the borders.

As for the curls, all you have to do is warm a Hershey's bar to about 80 degrees and then slowly shave off the curls with a vegetable peeler. I only made a few of the curls myself and it's a little tricky to get the chocolate to the exact right temperature for curling perfection - too warm and it creates mush, too cool and you get chips. So be patient if you're going to try this at home. Just find a warm spot above a heat source and test your chocolate bar with the peeler until you get curls. And if you get the chocolate too warm, just let it cool down a bit before shaving more off. Also, don't try heating your chocolate in the microwave.

The cake stand is the coolest part of all from a wedding-cake-making standpoint. Talk about easy! Beings each layer is on a separate plate, you don't have to insert dowels for support. And you don't have to worry about getting the layers centered on each other. Also, the cake is a LOT easier to move and set up. The only problem we had is that the stand and plates were white. Not acceptable to the bride. So a little floral tape and some duct tape later (really - brown duct tape - how redneck are we, anyway?), the stand and plate edges were appropriately brown!

Me trying all the cakes.
Photo: Sunlitway Photography

To top off the cake eating experience, we made lemon and Pink Champagne side cakes for those who don't like chocolate. Or for those (ME!) who wanted some of each. We used cream cheese icing on both but added a little lemon flavor to the icing for the lemon cake. All in all, the cakes were a huge success. And the wedding was really nice, too.


Oh! And if you're thinking about making a wedding cake, see my other DIY Wedding Cake post, as well. If you have any questions, please leave a comment here or on my other post and I'll be happy to answer if I can.

And if you'd like to learn cake decorating right in your own home, take a cake decorating class online through Craftsy! (affiliate link, fyi)

DIY Wedding Cake

DIY wedding cake.

I'm off to help make a wedding cake. My friend's daughter is getting married next weekend and we're coming out of wedding-cake-making retirement to whip one up! Although we keep swearing that we'll never do another cake, this one should be easy. All the lovely bride wants is chocolate, chocolate and more chocolate. We know that some guests don't like chocolate, however, so we're also making a couple of side cakes - probably pink champagne and maybe lemon?

We've been working together on wedding cakes nearly 30 years, since her husband's niece (a bride on a tight budget) needed one and I had a budding interest and some cake decorating stuff. Over the years, we've done many cakes together, and we've each done a few alone. It's been fun but we decided a few cakes ago that it's past time to move on! Baking, decorating, storing and transporting a multi-tiered wedding cake no longer works for us. But we'll make just one more....

So why are we starting so early? Well, we bake our layers and then freeze them prior to frosting. This serves a dual purpose - first, we can make the cake ahead of time (a huge stress reducer, especially if something goes wrong) and second, cakes are easier to frost when frozen. So we'll bake and freeze this week and then stack, frost and decorate the day before the wedding, which also allows the cake to defrost overnight. Does this actually work? Well, the proof is in the results, and one thing that we hear with every cake we've made is how yummy it is - our cakes are not only pretty, they are delicious!

Update 1/22/13 - If you'd like to take an online cake decorating class, Craftsy has several really good ones. I just discovered Craftsy and sure wish these were available back when I was learning! (links are affiliate, fyi)



And if you want to try your hand at making a wedding cake, here are my must-have recommendations: