it’s all in the details: creating a lace effect wedding cake

Morning readers!

Today, the wonderful cake designer Janet Mohapi-Banks  is sharing with us the process behind creating a lace effect wedding cake.   An intricate design and technique, using as much artistic skill as patience and attention to detail, a lace wedding cake is a beautiful way to echo the detail in your wedding dress. Lace wedding dresses are seeing a boost in popularity, in most part due to the beautiful dress worn by The Duchess of Cambridge at her wedding last year, and with lace details being incorporated in

Janet’s cakes are exquisite works of art, with an eye for perfection (she once remade a cake for a shoot for me the night before I collected it because she wasn’t absolutely happy with the first attempt!) she creates bespoke wedding cakes for clients throughout the UK, and works with some of London’s most prestigious venues, including The Connaught, The Dorchester and The Ritz London.  Her collections are unique and varied, and I have been lucky enough to feature both Janet’s 2011 collection, and her most recent 2012 collection here on b.loved.

Janet explains how she creates the effect ~

The first step to creating the lace pattern of your dress on your cake is to obtain a sample of the actual lace used. Quite often when you ask your dress maker for a lace sample the whole pattern might not be shown. If this happens the cake designer needs cut the lace up and jigsaw the pieces back together to create the pattern required. Pictures of your dress help will with this.

Once your cake designer has the whole lace pattern they will need to pin the lace to the cake as shown below.

The next sep in the process is to make small pinpricks that outline the pattern. The cake designer then pipes over the pinpricks with royal icing. This needs to be done in small sections as every stroke of piping needs to be brushed inwards using a damp icing paintbrush. If the section piped is too large, the icing will have set too hard to brush in properly. This technique is known as the brush embroidery technique. For a lot of lace patterns this might be the final effect that you desire. However for others, another stage is required that involves over piping the brush embroidery with a different coloured royal icing.

The final stage is to add some brushed white accents in between the lace patterns to complete the look. This cake had the lace pattern on one side and had some sugar roses on the other.

From measuring the sugar to fixing the ribbon on the cake board, this cake took approximately 30 hours to make.

Isn’t the overall effect just so pretty! I love the idea of a lace wedding cake, and hope Janet has inspired you to ask your cake designer for something special and creative for your big day!

To find out more about Janet and her services visit www.janetmohapibanks.com or email Janet directly at [email protected]