How to Bake a Wedding Cake – Part 3

Special Equipment

Although technically the cake in these photos was a birthday cake, it was the first successful cake that I managed to bake that had the scale and structure that I wanted my eventual wedding cake to have.

Shortly after I got started, it quickly became clear that in addition to making a list of ingredients, it is also really important to carefully examine what kind of additional tools and equipment will be needed when starting to bake a large cake. One of the most important lessons that I walked away with was that if you find that you need to purchase tools, make sure you buy them from a store that has a generous return policy. Because of the scale of wedding cake baking, a tool that might normally just be a little awkward can become a serious hindrance, but you may not realize it until you’ve tried using the tool a few times.

For instance, at first I bought a special cake leveling saw for cutting cakes into perfect layers. But it turned out that it was almost impossible to hold onto the large layers while sawing away at them with the cake leveler. I needed the help of an assistant to make it work, and even then I couldn’t seem to cut perfectly level layers.

I ended up returning the impossible cake leveler, and instead I purchased an 18” carving knife to top and slice the cakes. It required a little more caution and nerve wracking focus than the cake leveler, but it was inexpensive and it worked perfectly.

Another important thing to double check before baking is to make sure that your refrigerator is actually big enough to hold the bottom layers of cake. This can be a problem if you have a fancy side by side style refrigerator because the shelves tend to be much more narrow. Remember that even if the cake pan fits in there, once you put the icing on it will be a little wider. Don’t forget that you’ll need to be able to get your hands on the sides of the platter to slide the cake in and out of the fridge.

If you’re planning on making a heavy multiple-layer cake, you will need a giant platter or decorated piece of wood to base the cake on. They sell fancy custom cake platters online and at many stores, but Home Depot sells small round wooden table tops that work pretty well as a cake base.

While you’re at the hardware and hobby store, you might as well pick up some dowel rods to keep your cake upright and a framing level. When you make a stacked cake, it is critical the surface that the cake sits on be absolutely level. If you have an unstable base you risk collapse as the cake will slowly start to shift and tilt as it warms up while on display. If you find that there is no way to level the actual table surface, you’ll have to shim your cake base to make it stable and level before you begin stacking your layers.

They do sell lovely cake decorating platforms that rotate, but once your cake gets beyond a certain size, you’ll probably need something larger and even more stable. I used a large turntable that was meant for the inside of a cabinet.

Placing a baking stone in the oven is a great way to help even out oven temperature. It takes a little longer to preheat the oven, but it will keep the oven temperature more stable as the temperature of a regular home oven can fluctuate a lot and dry out or even burn your cakes. They are also great if you need to open the oven door for any reason while the cake levels are baking.

In addition to working through the technical aspects of baking and assembling a tiered cake, making my birthday cake was especially valuable because it made me realize that baking and icing an entire cake in one week is exhausting work. Because I wanted to look fresh and relaxed at my own wedding, I vowed to bake only cakes that could be baked and frozen ahead of time. There are a lot of cakes that actually improve in flavor with a little freezing, and that way I could spend the week of my wedding working on icing.