Fall Wedding Cakes

What is better than a wedding cake?  Two wedding cakes!

A few months ago, my husbands Aunt asked if I'd make her a wedding cake, she wanted a chocolate cake with chocolate ganache frosting and fall leaves and flowers down the side of the cake.  I came up with an idea and sent it to her.  She responded with, "can you make two cakes?"  One of them as we had already discussed and one similar only carrot cake with cream cheese frosting.  My plan was to get started on the gumpaste flowers weeks in advance, but time got away from me.  The week before the event, the scramble began.  So, my intent was to take pictures of all of the flowers in stages...

 

 But that is as far as I got. :)  As I get working on a time crunch I forget to stop to click the camera.  Oh well.  This is the beginning of the roses that I made.  I placed them all on wires (new for me), not sure it helped me tremendously in arranging them, but it was nice to try something new. 

 I made a double batch of chocolate ganache and cream cheese frosting.  I've never made chocolate ganache before. It was surprisingly easy and I loved how smoothly it went on the cake.  I'll definitely use it again.

 I spent an entire day baking 6 cakes (2 8" and 4 12" to be stacked).

 I frosted them separately and then stacked them.  There is filling inside the cakes as well.

 We drove an hour and a half to the site of the reception with the cakes frosted and stack.  The flowers were all ready to go as well.  I wanted to put it all together there so that I didn't have to worry about anything shifting on the long car ride.  In the picture above, I'm adding the shell border around the base of each cake.

 Above is a lot of the flowers and leaves that again were made ahead of time.  I tried modeling chocolate for the first time - hoping to make the leaves out of it.  It was very easy to make, but it was far to soft when we tried making the leaves.  At 10:00 the night before we decided not to mess with it and to use the gumpaste instead.  I have a lot of the modeling chocolate left over, so I think I might mess around with it a bit now to see what I can do with it without a time line.

Below, are the finished products.  I was very pleased with the finished product.  Which I don't say too often.  I spent over 40 hours on these two cakes.  Incredible amount of time, but I learned a lot and enjoyed my time (for the most part).