Remember those precious wedding cakes, covered in sticky chocolate sauce and carefully positioned chocolate hearts, 250 miles from their destination...?
The wedding cakes I'd made had to survive a long car trip to their destination. I didn't want to decorate them with anything too delicate, runny, wobbly or squishy.
I couldn't avoid some squishiness, so I bought three big plastic tubs, placed the cakes on their boards on the lids and wedged other things around them very carefully to absorb any shocks during transport. The tubs went over the tops to prevent anything falling on them.
When to add the chocolate shapes
I added the chocolate shapes as soon as the outer chocolate coating had cooled down enough to stop them melting and set enough to stop them sliding down. Try to have cool fingers or thin rubber / latex gloves for this, to avoid marking them with fingerprints.
When to do the piping
An earlier experiment: decorating the cake stand with roses and ribbons
The edges where the cakes met the boards were too messy to be left as they were, and needed piping to make them look pretty. I used 2 tubs of Fudgee chocolate icing and a piping bag for this.
I was faced with the difficult choice of doing piping in advance, and risking squashing it in the car, or adding the piping once the cake was set up in the venue. I decided to try the advance option, hope for the best, and take extra piping things to the venue just in case. The only one that did get slightly squashed was the smallest cake, because there was not a big enough margin around it on the board. That's a good reason for the boards to be 2 inches wider than the cakes.
Positioning the cake and decorating the table
Obviously, this has to be done at the venue, though it's worth practising beforehand.
Place the stand on the table and arrange the cakes on their boards onto the platforms.
The final arrangement
Place the cake topper statue carefully onto the top cake. If it's slightly out of place, step back and look again before you even consider moving it and messing up the icing. If you can find a little platform for it that's easier to place, so much the better.
Rotate the cake boards slightly till you find the best arrangement.
Finally, you can decorate the table. In my case, I placed a few red and white artificial roses around the cake, leaving plenty of white table cloth to contrast with the dark brown icing.
If you can't stop fiddling about trying to get the decorations right, stand back for a while, look at it from different angles, and remember, no one else is likely to look at the whole cake as closely as you!
