White Chocolate Birch Bark Wedding Cake

So this is a cake I worked on last year for my dear friend Beau's wedding. I always start custom cakes by sitting down with the clients and making a sketch with them. I find out what the client wants and (hopefully) represent what the final product will look like. This way I'm sure we are all on the same page. Beau and Elizabeth were having a more rustic wedding in the cold of a Colorado February and wanted a birch wedding cake.

They didn't like fondant so I offered to do the birch effect with chocolate. I practiced it a few times but the technique is pretty simple. You just melt a small amount of dark chocolate and paint different lines onto a piece of parchment. You could put this in the fridge if you don't want any smearing but I felt the mixing effect would add to the realism. Next you melt a bunch of white chocolate and drizzle it heavily over the lines. Spread the while chocolate with even spatula strokes and if you work side to side with the lines the graying effect looks really good.

These cakes were gluten free chocolate and I filled them with fresh strawberries and iced them in a chantilly frosting (which is really just fancy talk for adding whipped cream and almond extract to your cream cheese icing). I always crumb coat specialty cakes but with chocolate ones it's extra important.

It took up my WHOLE fridge! You can't see it but the top shelf was taken up by all the pans of chocolate. I really couldn't do a larger cake without a bigger kitchen.





This cake was going to Silverthorn so I thought it wise to transport in an unstacked format with zero decoration. I showed up to the event hall a couple hours before the wedding and worked in the kitchen assembling the cake. Stacking went smoothly and it didn't matter so much what the underneath cake looked like (so I forgot to get a picture). I pulled out all my chocolate pieces which I had pre-cut, I felt the strait lines of cutting made for better trees then trying to break the chocolate into right sized pieces. I went around the cake starting at the top putting chocolate piece after chocolate piece. There was a scary moment when I thought they might not make it but they did and the effect was just right. I added little buttercream pine cones but there were no extra flowers to add, the last thing was the topper which I added right before presenting.

It was a great time with great people and I was even there to cut the cake ^^