My Beautiful French Weekend

So......a couple of weekends ago I attended my gorgeous friend Natalie's Wedding.

 Actually it was Jubilee weekend so we all had a lovely long holiday :)

I met Natalie on a skiing holiday a few years ago, the same time as she had just met her new husband Olly. We have become firm friends and so I was honoured and very excited to attend their Wedding at the amazing Chateau Des Conde in Vallery, France.

Is this place amazing or what?! And we didn't just have a part of it.....we had the whole place to play in all weekend!!! I felt like a princess and I wasn't even the Bride.

(This is the 'check out MY Chateau' photo)

The Chateau is owned by Patrice Vansteenberghe a talented architect. The small turret like building to the top right in the aerial photo 'Le Pigeonnier' is the biggest dovecot in France with 2,844 pigeon holes.

Lucky pigeons.

It has been lovingly converted into the Honeymoon suite with the most amazing glass domed roof for gazing at the stars whilst lying in the most enormous circular bed.

(I only know this because me and some of the girls tested it out ;)

I loved this place from the minute we all arrived, so relaxed and informal. Natalie is such a gorgeous and naturally pretty girl, this came across in all of her choices and the way that she and Olly planned their big day. No airs and graces. The Chateau very much had this feel about it too. Endless long corridors with little doors leading to a multitude of rooms filled with quirky old French furniture, even an old hippo skull!

The morning of the Wedding the florists had arrived and filled the main room with simple cream roses and the most amazing smelling mint. Natalie even had mint in her Bridal bouquet.

Roses were hung from the ceiling in giant balls with lengths of ivy randomly hanging from swags of fabric. Just lovely.

Here they are taking their vows in the local church, a mere stones throw from the Chateau. Olly is a Major in the Royal Marines hence the smart uniform and Natalie's dress was simple and flattering in shape with a beautiful rose lace overlay and long veil.

She looked stunning.

Not only did they plan treats for themselves, but there was a surprise treat for the guests as we walked through the village and back to the Chateau from the Church.

 The Chateau surround sound system was blasting out a very grand piece of music from a film (I guessed might be Gladiator) and as we approached the main gateway we were greeted by....

A knight in full armour! (actually one of the guests had legged it back through the grounds after the ceremony) it took 13 minutes to put on apparently.

I couldn't help but give him a peck on the cheek as I passed :)

I'm the one in the blue dress!

And if you are ever stuck for a suitable place to pop your champagne glass there is always a hedge. I must admit I lost several empty glasses through this hedge, but that one is just between you and me ;)

Here I am mucking about in the grounds, I think I was starting to get a little drunk at this stage! All of these photos (except the cake ones) were taken by me, but Nat and Olly did have a professional on board, my lovely colleague Rebecca  at Catwalk Wedding. I managed to catch her from an upstairs window taking pictures of the Bride and Groom.

Oh and I must remember the cake!....I offered to make Nats cake when she told me a French man was going to do it for her. He had asked her 'what else other than raisins' should he put in her fruitcake.

I laughed out loud and said 'I know the french make the most amazing patisserie, but they cannot make a good old English fruitcake!'

 The cake was made in 3 parts, boxed up and taken to France in a guests car.

Natalie chose the lace and personalised cake topper and I assembled it all on arrival.

Simple and elegant.....tasty too with plenty of raisins, apricots, currants, prunes, sultanas, dates, almonds, oranges, lemons and BRANDY!

I could waffle about this wonderful Wedding for ages but I will finish of by saying,

'Les plus beaux jours de notre vie'

'The best days of our life'

Rachelx

One hot Saturday....

Wow it's been hot hot hot today. Makes a change from all that rain we've been having. Today I delivered a huge cake to the Royal Naval College in Greenwich. It was one of my popular floral cakes and so I thought I'd tell the story of it's creation :)

The beginning of every cake journey has to start in the kitchen......and this cake was a whopper. Five tiers of chocolate mud cake and carrot cake. With a side cutting cake too. The cake needed to feed 300 guests so there was alot of baking to do.

Every cake is baked twice for extra height (by this I mean I bake 2 cakes!) , spliced, sliced, filled and levelled. Levelling a cake at this stage is sooooo important and as I tell all my students in class, take time to get this part right! I have a lovely yellow kitchen spirit level, a vital ingredient in cake construction. And a cake of this size needs to be level, or when it all gets stacked it could go horribly wrong.

When I do cakes with fresh flowers, unlike alot of cake makers, I do all the floristry myself.

I believe it is my job to leave the cake looking perfect and so I go to New Covent Garden myself to select the flowers.

I love getting up early on a summers morning to be greeted by the hustle and bustle of the market. Everything is so pretty and I inevitably come home with something I shouldn't! 

The colours are just fantastic and such an inspiration. However todays cake is going to be elegant and cream. The lovely Ken from Robert Allen florists always takes my order a few days in advance and has my flowers ready and waiting when I arrive. Sometimes if he's lucky I take him some cakey offcuts ;)

Today I picked up cream Avalanche roses, white Hydrangea and cream Akito roses. All five of the cakes were iced in a cream fondant icing, then I hand piped a side design using a no. 3 nozzle for a nice raised effect.

Once the design was piped on, I wanted it to have a pearly sheen so I painted carefully over the top of the piping with a pearl lustre dust. This gives a lovely shimmery effect, as well as dusting over the whole cake with my favourite sparkle dust 'Snowflake' by sugarflair.

Finally, after all 5 cakes were piped and shimmered, I could apply the flowers. I like to do the big roses before I leave for the venue and then the rest when I get there. This helps to avoid any wilting....and today was pretty hot!

Abigail also chose to have little gold ball details and some bits of greenery. I chose a dainty eucalyptus for a slightly Grecian look.

Today  Abigail and Jaspers Wedding was at the Painted Hall, part of the Royal Naval College in Greenwich. I have always set up my cakes in the Painted Hall after the ceremony, but this cake went into the Queen Mary's Undercroft.....

After unloading all the boxes and buckets of flowers I got to work with the assembly. This cake is going to be tall :)

This is the eucalyptus going in amongst the roses..... then cake by cake I created a huge tower.

I attempted a photograph from the top looking down, but my chair was not quite high enough.

And here is the finished result!

I hope it tasted nice and congratulations to Abigail and Jasper.

The Story of Abney and Teal....in cake!

This is the story of Abney and Teal, they live on an island in the middle of a lake, in the middle of a park, in the middle of the hustle and bustle of a big city. Sounds like a lovely way to live don't you think?

Each year I have a lovely client order a cake for their gorgeous little girl Zadie.

The great thing about my job is I get to research lots of lovely things whilst deciding on a cake design. And this week I fell in love with the little organic and earthy characters of Abney, Teal, Neep.....who I believe is a parsnip and the Poc Pocs, funny little wooden things !

This year Zadie is two and this is her favourite programme.

So we started baking.....a lovely vanilla and raspberry cake and covered it in lashings and lashings of delicious buttercream.

Then we smoothed it all off in preparation to be covered in fondant.

In the meantime.....whilst the fondant was drying I watched a bit of CeeBeebies and did some research. Then I constructed the elements to make these cool little characters. The really nice thing about this cake is that the colours of the animation are quite 'dirty' so it was a real challenge to mix the colours, yet still make the cake fun and rich in colour. What I wanted to avoid was bright primary colours, but emulate the organic look of the programme at the same time.

Making the little Poc Pocs was a challenge because I wanted to make them look like wood! (I think they are supposed to be carved from wood in the programme) Once all the bits and bobs were made I stuck them into the positions I wanted them to be on the cake. So I propped them up on an old polystyrene dummy. And used a big pot of sugarflair to stop Abney from falling over!

You might be wondering why Teal has no shoes, well I plan for her to have her feet dipped in the lake :)

To go with the cake I also did a batch of lovely vanilla and raspberry cupcakes, yum. I wanted them to have a simple design so made half of them in a daisy design and half with 'Eat Me' cake pics. I'm a bit of a creative, so made all the cake picks myself with some lovely paper I found in the craft shop. Then I crafted some mini bunting to string across the cake providing my idea went to plan. As you can see I printed Zadie's name across the flags. Sometimes I think it's nice not to blast 'Happy Birthday' over everything but to do it in a different way.

The daisies I made using a simple daisy plunger cutter. But I like my daisys to dry in an irregular fasion and so I made some formers from tin-foil. Sometimes the best equipment can be found at home in the cupboard!

Then I popped all the elements on top of the cupcakes with a big yummy whirl of vanilla buttercream. Gosh, I do things like this everyday and I still want to eat cake. Surely working with cake is supposed to put you off wanting to eat it all the time. Hmmmmm.

Cute but simple. The idea is that the main cake will be displayed on a pedestal cake stand and all the little cupcakes will sit around the base. Zadie is very lucky to get so many cakes for her birthday.

Finally to the big cake, I know you all want to know what happened next.......well I built the lovely lake and I built the island that Abney and Teal live on and I grew the grass and flowers in the park for the Poc Pocs to play in......

Then I put the lovely Abney and Teal in the positions I had planned for them and it all came together! Teal dipped her feet in the lake whilst Abney strung up the bunting. Not forgetting 'Neep' who watched over them both :)

At first I thought Neep was like the British Gas flame.....now I know he is a parsnip. And he has to be a 'He' as girls are too pretty to be parsnips.

The final cake. I totally enjoyed making this one and I hope you enjoyed reading the  story.

Rachelxx

When I met Tandy....

A few weeks ago at an event at Chandos House in central London, I caught up with the lovely Tandy of Tandy and Kerry . We were both showcasing our services to potential Brides to be. Tandy's work really caught my eye and she took some amazing pictures of my work that day!

Tandy and Jackson

Tandy is a wonderful photographer, who I believe also has a passion for baking, maybe that is why she took a liking to Rachelle's! Tandy does all sorts of photography, including Weddings and Babies. It was her baby photography that really caught my eye.





Just gorgeous! 



I'm a bit of a sucker for the pictures with Daddies in! I do love a good black and white photo. And these beautiful pictures are so pure and wonderfully styled.

Some of Rachelle's cakes photographed by Tandy at the Chandos House Wedding event.

I like to dabble with my own photography and tend to photograph most of my own cakes, but wow, it really does make a difference when you let a pro do the job.

To see more of Tandy's  amazing photography, check out the website www.tandykerry.co.uk I'm sure she would be more than happy to capture some special moments for you.

I do love a bit of self promotion, I also love close-up photos with an out of focus foreground:)

It's so nice to meet such talented people in the Wedding Industry, especially when they are so passionate about their work. Chandos House did a lovely event that day, including continually topping up my glass with the finest champagne....

Until next time.......

Why a Wedding Planner?

Last week I caught up with the lovely Melanie Helen from Cranberry Blue Weddings and Events. I love meeting all the different people that work in wedding world. We last hooked up on a lovely photoshoot that Melanie styled and I had a little chat with her about why Wedding Planners are usefull when it comes to organising the 'Big Day'.

Melanie Helen

 How did you become a Wedding Planner?

I started my career working for the French designer Roland Mouret and worked on London Fashion Week which was amazing. It gave me my first taste of event planning.  I then moved into Fashion Buying, but during that time I became more and more involed in the event side of the business which was my true passion.  I was then asked to assist in planning a wedding and that's when the light bulb moment came for me as I realised this was what I was born to do!  I received a couple of referrals from that first wedding and through a lot of hard work and determination it developed from there.  I then set up my own company -
'Cranberry Blue Weddings' in 2009.

How does a Wedding Planner help?

Where would you like me to start?!  Firstly I would say that we have the knowledge and experience in how to successfully organise a wedding.  As the majority of couples won't have done this before, how would you know where to start, or what pitfalls to avoid?  I always say - do you want to look back on your wedding and be disappointed or say 'I wish we'd done that differently'? We can save you a lot of money - through our connections and tough negotiations we can help you stay within budget and secure some fantastic deals.

We can save you a lot of time - planning a wedding is a complex task and it's easy to under-estimate the time it actually takes. You can avoid spending hours trawling the internet and attending bridal fairs to try to find those perfect suppliers to fit your budget and taste.  You also have the confidence that all of the suppliers we work with are reliable and of a high calibre so will provide the best end result and won't let you down.

 We can also allieviate the stress involved, you can easily feel completely over-whelmed. We help to guide you through the process so that you can enjoy the planning stages.

What is the best part of your job?

Mmm that's a tough one, but I'd probably say creating the design concept and making it a reality.  I love the fact that every wedding is unique and never do the same thing twice.

Painted Hall, Greenwich

How do you deal with an indecisive Bride?

This is actually quite a common occurance but I work with her to discuss the different options and find out exactly what it is that she wants.  Sometimes people don't know initially, but it's helping them work through this process until they are happy.  I give my opinion as to what I think would work best for them, helping to give them confidence in making the right decision.

 How do you help when it comes to choosing a cake?

Cake by Rachelle's

Also one of the fun bits of planning a wedding (how can you not love a cake tasting?!)  I discuss my clients ideas with them in terms of style and flavours, some have a very clear idea about what they'd like but others aren't so sure.  In this instance I would make suggestions about the type of cake I can see working with the overall theme.  From here I then propose which cake designers would best fit their required style and also budget.  I tend to include a suggestion that may stretch them a bit as quite often they are surprised and end up choosing something a bit different.

Adrian and Ginger

What was the most fun Wedding you ever worked on?

Tricky one but probably a wedding in Austin, Texas a couple of years ago. The Bride was American but they both lived in London so wanted someone they could work closely with over here.  It was super to not have to worry about the weather as it was guaranteed to be boiling hot so everything was outside. The details were really fun, we served ice tea as one of the reception drinks, the bride arrived in a yellow taxi, the guests had a short dance lesson with the swing band and then at the end of the night the couple made their way to a horse drawn carriage through a line of sparklers.

Thanks Melanie!

It's great to have an association with such a wonderful Wedding Planner. Rachelle's are proud to be recommended cake suppliers for Cranberry Blue Weddings.

Did you know that a Cranberry Blue is a butterfly?! How cute is that.