“Oh, we’re not planning on having a cake anymore,” said my brother. “But! Cake! Wedding! Cake!” I spluttered at him incoherently. And that’s how I came to be researching wedding cakes prior to his wedding, which is three weeks away.

I knew I didn’t want to do the traditional fruit cake under hard icing, because fruit cake isn’t really my area of baking expertise, and cake decorating really isn’t. I am of the rustic school of icing cakes (slap it on, she’ll be right). But thankfully for anyone looking around online wondering how to make a wedding cake, Smitten Kitchen baked a cake for a friend’s wedding and wrote a series of posts detailing the recipes, the experiments, and the grand feat of engineering that is creating tiers of cake. So in an honourable effort of plaigarism, I decided to follow closely in her footsteps.

This was the test run of what will be the top tier of the two-tiered cake – a vanilla buttermilk cake with mango curd and buttercream icing. Gloriously rich, with a tang of tartness from the mango curd.

Putting it all together with the icing was a bit more difficult than I anticipated. I think I may have overwhipped the icing, which was a little lumpy, and parts of the cake kept emerging from the smooth blanket of icing that I was attempting to create. But apart from lacking skill with a spatula, the rest of the construction went well, and I feel reasonably confident about doing it again (along with the bottom tier, which is chocolate cake with a ganache filling) in a couple of weeks.