Project in copper – Part 7 – Sterling Adventures

This will be almost the last post on this item before the grand opening. Richard G. and I have been amazed how this has turned out with every successive step. It all began with Richard D. suggesting that we have a caving-themed wedding cake, that is a cake with a stream running through it. I explained to him that this may be difficult in terms of icing erosion, but we both got hooked on the idea of having a stream – especially me! I soon decided that a cream stream would be even better and would confuse the hell out of all our wedding guests. The original idea was to have a helter skelter structure with the stream running around it, however after some discussion with my structural engineer, Richard G., it became apparent that this would be difficult. He came up with the idea of the leaves and then the need for large amounts of copper … because we’re tight and of course keen on recycling 🙂 , we opted for the second hand hot water cylinder from Jonathan Pitts. That decision worked out great except for the black covering that was on one side of the copper and which needed an incredible amount of wire wool buffing to shift! I think we did an ok job in the end.

So here it is on Sunday we added a few leaves and buffed for a few hours… all we need to do now is bake the two small chocolate sachertortes and the one large one -which will be located on a board on the 3 copper legs (we were going to have 4, but we couldn’t get the drill into the middle of the structure to drill the fourth hole!), we need to make some chocolate frogs and then cover the base with some green (perhaps) material. Finally we need to buy a few pints of cream, attach the pump and hey presto …. hopefully it will cause much confusion and hilarity at the wedding. And, if the cream stream overtops, I will personally find it absolutely hilarious! I hope you are all impressed that we even have the BS safety mark – that was not planned at all and wasn’t realised until we turned over a newly cut flower shape – of course it had to stay!

Carol, Richard’s wife, was also somewhat concerned that the small cake flowers were not level – this was entirely intended!

Finally, thank you so much to Richard G. for taking on the challenge of our somewhat bizarre idea! He was instrumental in there actually being a plan at each successive stage of the construction.