Wedding at 'The Bod'

I'm back from an amazing experience I'll never forget!  I agreed to bake my cousin's wedding cake.  This seems pretty straight forward, until you realize I live 6000 miles away and I would have to find a way to create a vision of amazingness in a country I no longer live in, where I am unfamiliar with the ingredients and equipment available!

As you can see by the pictures, the venue was incredible, the divinity room of the Bodlean Library in Oxford.  Just amazing!  I learned that some of Harry Potter was filmed here, along with many other films, and the place is just dripping with history, having been used as a library for over 400 years.

Oxford is so full of history, it was fun to go for pizza in a building that was built in 1193!

My cousin and his new wife are total science fiction and computer game geeks, so their request was that they didn't want anything normal or 'weddingy'.  They settled upon 3 companion cubes as their cakes from a computer game called Portal, which made it a little easier as I didn't have to stack a huge cake.

I made a large 9" vanilla cake with vanilla cream and raspberry jam, this cake did have some internal support.  There was a 7" carrot cake and a 5" chocolate cake.

It was great to get my cousin involved, he was very helpful in cutting out many of the panels for the cubes, it must be pretty unusual to get roped into creating your own wedding cake!

The caterers did a great job, a new idea that I've not heard of was that each table had a designated 'carver' and they had to dress up in an apron and chef's hat and carve the meat for the table, everyone had a lot of fun with it!