Garden theme wedding cake

I know it's been an awfully long time since I've posted any cakes - or anything for that matter. We had our busiest month ever this October making cakes for weddings, birthdays and bat mitzvahs. Now that wedding season has officially slowed down in Austin, I can take a moment to catch up on some photos. I downloaded a ton of pics today from my camera (ok, about 100 were from my daughter's birthday party) so I've got a lot to sift through. 

 I'll just go backwards and start with this past weekend. We've been doing more cakes this past year with handmade sugarpaste flowers. In order to make sure the flowers look real, it takes a lot of patience and time to form them and dust them to achieve the right look. I think the most we've done on a cake recently was about 18 roses. This cake was on a whole new level of complexity. I think in the end we made 50 roses, 6 peonies, 4 hydrangea clusters, budding branches and about 60 leaves. Each peony has between 11 and 25 handformed individual petals, and each hydrangea cluster has about 7 handformed petals.

We started about 2 weeks before making the flowers so we wouldn't be stressed about them right before the wedding. Good planning paid off! They were all done and ready to go a few days before. Since it was our last delivery of the day, we were able to take our time arranging the flowers on the cake onsite at the Four Seasons.
The traditional design was an important factor for the bride. Her grandfather used to be a wedding cake decorator in the days when all cakes looked like this. She asked for  traditional piping techniques and lots of flowers in pinks, magentas and whites.
My goal is to post a new cake a day - let's see if I can manage that! We did so many beautiful and fun cakes the past 2 months that I want to share!