This cake was a lot of fun to plan and execute…I started with a bunch of ideas from the bride, who was doing a Wonderland-type theme for flowers and colors.
The issue was that the two ideas she had included were the colorful wonky cakes and a more traditional “pretty” cake. So I wanted to include the tone of the pretty cake, but have it be more whimsical at the same time.
The sketch I came up with had a tree curving around the cake, which included scenes from the Classic Alice to keep it less cartoony.
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The tree had an internal armature and was covered with modeling chocolate. The leaves were wafer paper, and I painted some of them green and some white with black veins to match the black and white on the cake.
I also attached some flowers in blue and purple, which were two of the colors that the bride was using. The bottom two tiers were buttercream and the top two were fondant. It was on a 20″ wide board and it was about 30″ tall including the tree.
The figures were all cut out of flat pieces of gumpaste, and I drew the characters on them using food coloring. I piped the borders on and painted the buttercream gold.
The buttercream background was done by starting with a white cake then spreading a light blue buttercream over that. I didn’t want it to be too dark, so by doing the icing that way it makes the color look transparent.
I also wanted it to look like sky in back of the characters, and that’s a good way to make a sky blue color.
The bride had a topper that I put into the teacup that was the top tier.
I had measured the height of the tree to make sure that it would both fit into my car and that the topper would fit under the top branch when it was sitting on the top tier. The Cheshire cat was perched above the topper.
Since this was going to be “cake in the round” there were figures and other decorations on all sides of the cake.
The second tier had a book binding on it with gold-edged pages on the front. I cut out a section and inserted wafer paper pages with illustrations and text from the story on them.
I also put text from the book around the base of the cake.
Also on the base was a tree root that wrapped around the bottom edge of the cake. I thought about having the roots reaching up onto the cake itself, but I decided that would make it a little too creepy, which isn’t what I was going for.
The second tier from the bottom had trees and leaves painted on the buttercream, I used straight food coloring for that and just painted it right on. I also put some black and white flowers with faces on them to represent the garden of talking flowers.
Around the back of the cake was a 3-D “drink me” bottle that I drew on in the same style as the characters to give it the same sketched look.
I hung items from the tree, including a gumpaste pocketwatch, hearts, and card suit symbols.
The rabbit was standing in front of the hole in the base of the tree trunk, and I put some cards on the side of the bottom tier.
My goal for this cake was to do something that was true to the book but also a little romantic like one of the pictures the bride liked.
The light blue kept it soft…If I had gone with a deeper color it would have been cartoony, which is what I didn’t want. I did put a brighter blue on the book cover to go with the deeper colors that the bride was using and to tie it together with the bottom tiers.
