Amazing Wedding Cakes - Origami Wedding Cake

Konichiwa!! Welcome back to Happy Sugar Baking Land and the continuing saga of  Merci Beaucoup on WE tv’s Amazing Wedding Cakes! Husband Mike checking in with what is probably our most normal cake of the season, the Origami Crane Wedding Cake.

We have one coming up next week that is sort of a normal wedding cake on steroids, but the Origami cake is a terrific representation of the kind of standard wedding cakes that we do. It is elegant with some nice detail and size appropriate. You see these giant cakes on all these shows and that is more the exception than the rule. This time we delivered a cake to both feed and light up the room.

Marc did the consultation this time, a rarity for him. I think he did a good job though! Sometimes one of the  hardest parts of meeting with the couple is helping them get what they need. If you come to us, you’re getting our years of experience and that means our professional opinion. We’ll do everything possible to give you what you want, but we will also make sure it works for your wedding as well. Marc recognized that a full origami crane made of cake would be too big and too expensive for their budget and wedding size, so he steered them towards a more traditional base with that awesome chocolate painted crane on top. We actually found a simple silver and red patterned piece of origami paper and that is what was used for the crane’s final look.

I just want to say a big thank you to my mom’s friend Shoko who is an origami master and took time out of her schedule to make up a couple little crane’s for us to reference. They were invaluable to the process and a whole lot quicker than us trying to figure it out!

The biggest problem this week was with the red bands around the tiers. I don’t think they showed it and it was probably pretty hard to tell on T.V., but that was a buttercream cake! The color was awesome in my opinion by the way and it was a smoothed out buttercream with a nice rounded edge at the top. Then the red band was piped around the bottom of each layer, so when we saw that they were a little wonky, and with time a ticking, it was either make it work or basically strip the cakes and re-frost them. The later wasn’t a good option, so Reva and Marc made some fixes and managed to get the top tier redone to provide a beautiful perch for our crane.

Speaking of the crane, little known fact, Marc actually made two of them. He picked one to paint and then the other he used in a practical joke on Karyn. While she and Reva were working on some sugar flowers, Marc walked the crane over and then tripped himself and dropped the crane on the ground, smashing it  into a dozen pieces!! Karyn had no idea what was coming and the look on her face was priceless! Needless to say this led to quite a fit of laughter around the bakery over the next couple days. I thought they had gotten it all on camera, but I guess they didn’t. Oh well, you had to be there.

The delivery was smooth with the crane flying there in a separate box with some padding around it to make sure those chocolate wings didn’t fall off. Marc came along this time with Reva and myself at the request of the bride and groom. They wanted to have both of them there to cut the cake. This is actually pretty unusual for us and not a service we commonly offer. We rarely have the time to do something like that, but since the reception was a little later in the evening than usual, we got all our work done at the shop and headed over. The Stargazer banquet facility was a trip too. They had a wall with all the celebrities who had eaten there and even shots from an indie picture that filmed there called “Scorched.” That’s not unusual in Los Angeles, but I guess the selection of names was kind of amusing. It didn’t look like much from the outside, but the place was pretty cool inside.

I’ve been meaning to shout out our crew along the way too. Because of scheduling etc., we had three different producers work with us during filming. The first was Margaret. She guided the first three cakes you saw this season plus all those shots of Reva and Marc around Los Angeles. Miss you Midge! With this cake, we see the first of three cakes we did with Alexis and let me tell you, she was a huge part of this delivery! She made sure things happened on time, cause as you might know, wedding receptions are always late. But Alexis was on top of it all.

You know what I just remembered? They did some great interviews with some of the guests that didn’t make the show. You know, it’s T.V. and there is only so much time, but there were super cool people at the reception and I want to thank them for how great they were to us the bakery, and us the Amazing Wedding Cakes crew.

I wasn’t sure when they first mapped it out, but the end product was wonderful with the branches and flowers etc. I’m a huge fan of Japanese culture as well and I thought it was very fitting for the nation that it represented and a great example of how to take a simple wedding cake and toss in just enough character to make it amazing.

Thanks for watching everyone and I promise to get back on schedule next week and have our next Amazing Wedding Cakes blog up on Monday. As I said, we have a monster of a pastry coming up so set those DVRs!!