When I first decided to pursue my baking hobby as a full time career just over a couple of years ago, I was only baking cupcakes and basic butter or chocolate cakes with no icing. Even then, I only knew how to do simple frosting on my cupcakes with sugar sprinkles.
Over the years, I have moved on to learn more decorating skills. Nevertheless, my comfort zone has been with small cakes, cupcakes and cookies. When my nephew wanted to get married last year, my sis-in-law gave me the challenge to bake his wedding cake. It was the first time that I had to bake a large cake (by my standard, the 12 inch base cake was already large). The biggest challenge was to cover the cake with fondant. I had successfully covered the 6 inch cake and the 9 inch cake on first try. But it was only on my third attempt (plus tons of wasted fondant) that I was able to cover the 12-inch cake. It was another series of three for me to remember .. three tiered cakes completed by 3 am and I had only three hours of sleep before heading to the wedding venue with the cakes in tow.
Gold and white wedding cake
This was the completed three tier wedding cake for my nephew. The theme colour was white and gold. The cakes were the Classic Butter, our family all time favourite.
All my efforts made worthwhile when I saw how stunning the wedded couple looked while cutting the cakes...
Pink and purple wedding cake
I continued learning to cover big cakes from there on. This was a wedding cake that I baked for a friend. She wanted a two tier wedding cake, purple and pink theme. As I had read and learned how to cover bigger cakes by this time, they were successfully covered on first attempt :)
The 9 inch top cake :-
The 12 inch base cake :-
The cakes on the stand :-
Purple and white wedding cake
Here's another two tier wedding cake that I baked for a friend's daughter. She wanted a purple wedding cake decorated with orchids.
Top cake (9 inch Classic Butter cake) :-
Top view of the top cake :-
The 12 inch base cake :-
Gold and purple theme wedding
Cake cutting ceremony by the lovely couple.
In conclusion, I would like to share my takeaway from a chapter that I read sometime back in Robin Sharma's book The Greatness Guide where he mentioned this formula "Focus plus daily improvement plus time equals genius." Genius as he mentioned is "what you can excel at. Discover your talents and work like crazy to polish them." I truly believe in continuous learning and improvement. As such, Sharma's formula is stucked in my mind. I still have a long way to go but I have gathered so much joy throughout the journey so far as I am doing something that I love. Are you doing something that you love?