Beach wedding cake based on a pretty pebble: a bespoke design to represent Jess & Tim’s love story
When Jess and Tim came to their consultation, they knew they wanted a beach wedding cake – but they didn’t just want any beach wedding cake. They wanted a beach wedding cake that represented a particular memento from a particular moment on a particular beach: their engagement!
The inspiration
Though Jess and Tim weren’t having an overtly beach themed wedding, the seaside holds special significance for them as a couple, and they wanted to represent that on their wedding day. “Tim and I spent a while looking at cakes that you had made in the past, and were really inspired by a sea themed cake you’d done which had a wave up the side,” Jess explains.
Jess is super creative herself and came to the consultation with some lovely sketches for their cake on her iPad. One thing in particular caught my eye, though: a story about a pebble! “When Tim proposed to me he proposed on the beach at Wells-Next-the-Sea.” Jess continues. “Just before Tim proposed I had found a pebble on the beach which I gave to him, and had layers of a grey-ish blue, cream and sandy yellow colour. We wanted to use this pebble as inspiration for our cake, and spent some time together creating some sketches as ideas.
“We then went to meet Imogen and showed her the pebble. We told her our proposal story a little nervously (thinking that perhaps we were being a bit strange to request a cake like a stone) but Imogen was so excited about the design and created a beautiful sketch for us in person which we could already tell was going to be brilliant.”
It goes without saying, Jess and Tim were not strange to request a cake like a stone - they were amazing to do that! Textured wedding cakes are my speciality, and whilst I’m more often found making cakes look like granite, concrete or marble, it was wonderful to work on emulating a different stone.
Bespoke beach wedding cake
I got to work straight away on recreating the stone’s unique colours and patina in a way that would translate to their beach wedding cake. Jess and Tim chose to have two tall, slim tiers, picking a zesty lemon and passionfruit curd flavour for the top tier, and a headier, richer coffee and Amaretto flavour for the base.
Using white sugarpaste as my canvas, I played around with creating the perfect texture before then starting on the colour. On one sheet of textured sugarpaste, I handpainted a warm, golden yellow colour, which I then used to wrap around the top tier. For the bottom tier I painted the sugarpaste with blue, in an ombré gradient style that reflected the pebble going from blue to white (and was also emulated by the watercolour blue menus on each plate.)