Mexican Chocolate Wedding Cake
Making this wedding cake alternated between being awesome and scary every hour or so. With every success, I could envision the final product sitting on display with everyone telling me how great it looked and tasted. On the other hand, every time something went wrong, I pictured total disaster with curdled frosting on an ugly cake, and the bride crying because I totally ruined her day. As I was finishing things up the morning of the wedding, it became a real Ace of Cakes race against the clock situation, even doing the final touches at the reception hall with a crowd of people watching.
I made a 6-batch of this cake at one time, but realized I didn’t have a big enough bowl to mix it in so I used this huge aluminum tray I had laying around.
The first 2 layers of the cake with the base frosting on.
My parents fridge was filled with desserts.
The day of the wedding we had just enough room to fit everything in the cars.
I didn’t put the top half onto the bottom half until we arrived. Then there was some quick frosting, touch-ups, and adding all the flowers.
There was some debate about using fondant, but in the end I decided not to cause even though it is pretty, it’s also gross.
The frosting was a vanilla Italian meringue butter cream. It gets nice and hard in the fridge, so I had some helpers make the flowers on wax paper, we froze them, and they they were easy to stick on to the cake.
All the other desserts. More info on the rice krispy treats tomorrow.
Steph gave me a nice shout out on the menu.
Watching the cake that I worked so hard on get cut up in mere minutes was a bit of a shocker, but it was all worth it.
Ive been using the Ina Garten chocolate cake recipe as my go-to for years. I just added 2 teaspoons of cinnamon and 1 teaspoon of ground arbol chile to the recipe.
Italian Meringue Butter Cream is a tough frosting to make, but it is the best! Just be sure to read ALL the instructions. I had a mild disaster when I was trying to rework the frosting straight from the fridge. It got all curdled! You need to let it get to room temp before mixing it up.
Looks good! Have you tried making marshmallow fondant? It’s WAY better than the rolled fondant you get from most bakeries. I’m not sure that it would have gone with a slightly spicy cake, but I put it on the homemade funfetti wedding cake I made 2 months ago, and people were surprised/pleased at how much they liked it.
So cool that you got to cater a wedding! I love Ina Garten’s chocolate cake recipe too.
Everything came out great and tasted awesome. Such a wonderful thing for you to do for the wedding, as stressful as it might have been.
The flowers with the ridge-y type petals look real good. Who did those ones? 😉
That’s an amazing dessert display! Great job on the cake!
Beautiful cake! Wedding desserts are stressful, but you totally rocked it. I made the wedding cake (and a gazillion cupcakes) for my wedding… rolling fondant the night before the big day definitely had me questioning my sanity, but it all came out well in the end (thanks to the help of my AMAZING maid of honor).
Dan, that cake is gorgeous. I want to be a at a wedding with that exact spread. Please make it happen. Or just make me a cake please