Let ’em eat wedding cake!

I carefully, no avidly, avoided the recent Royal Wedding. You know the one. Even if you couldn”t completely ignore it, watching TV like that for hours isn’t me. We hired a video on the night, stoked up the open fire and only saw bits of it when I accidently pushed the wrong button getting to the ‘Extra Features’ .

I did notice however the way that ‘Kate’s wedding dress’ frenzy spilled into every newspaper I read after the event, with designers ‘ripping off’ the dress pattern and making their own copies that apparently will be appearing on a bride near you for the next year or so. I do hope, they’re all as slim.

But, as a foodie I can get excited (or bemused) by copying the Royal Wedding cake. I’ve just got the press release from Baroque Bistro-Patisserie and it tells the story in enough detail and fun to share here.

“Baroque Bistro master pâtissier Jean-Michel Raynaud has recreated William & Kate’s extravagant royal wedding cake in just 48 hours.

After receiving pictures of the cake early on Saturday, Raynaud worked around the clock in Baroque’s patisserie kitchen with a team of three to recreate the royal’s decadent affair by Monday morning. The original cake, which featured over 17 different flower designs, 900 individually iced flowers and eight tiers, took the original cake maker Fiona Cairns and her extensive team five weeks to complete at an estimated cost of AU$80,000. Raynaud’s cake mimicked each of these elaborate icing flowers and buds, with each of these painstakingly hand moulded petal-by-petal and positioned on the cake. Other intricate details were also incorporated, much of which used the complicated ‘Lambeth’ piping technique to create the 3-dimensional scrollwork and flowers.

French Patissier Raynaud, former head chef of 3-Michelin starred Le Petit Nice, found the time frame to be the biggest challenge in the cake recreation. He says: “We knew that we had to work quickly, which was especially difficult seeing as many of the fine, delicate details of the cakes decoration would usually take weeks. The flowers were definitely the most time consuming aspect of the recreation, as many of them – such as the acorn and the thistle – we were making for the first time.”

The only significant difference in Raynaud’s cake was the dropping of the bottom tier, although the cake is still sufficient in size to serve over 1200 people. Raynaud estimates a cake like the one he created would cost around $8000 – $10,000.

The cake will be on display at Baroque Bistro, at 88 George Street in The Rocks, for the next few weeks – don’t miss out on the opportunity to see it for yourself!”

 I do hope somebody made a video of the cake construction, I made this video of us mulching the roses near the shed at Bungendore. I used up all the old newspapers so had to buy a couple of the tabloid rags to get enough coverage. Of the ground, that is. True.

I was turned off by Royal Wedding frenzy, but the cake? That’s different.