Proud as a Peacock! A Wedding Cake Inspired by Lindy Smith

I recently mentioned on  the Lindy’s Cakes Facebook page that I was creating a peacock inspired cake and was getting very excited about it! I find Peacocks fascinating birds with their iridescent blue-green plumage and spectacular fanning tail.  Not only are they a symbol of pride and beauty but also symbolise eternal life, kindness, knowledge and compassion.  In short, the peacock is iconic and stand-alone – and as such, I think is a superb source of inspiration.

One of our  Cake Friends, Carol Slater-Garner saw my comment and as you will see from her story was inspired by peacocks and by my cake designs!

Carol’s ‘Peacock Perfect’ Wedding

“Most girls dream of the big white wedding, but when it comes to it the big ideas soon escalate into many pounds & the dream has to have a reality check. But for me it was more of a case of “do I HAVE to wear white?”, with my love of colour & my spiky hair that ranges in colour from a copper orange, to a berry red or sometimes plum, white really wouldn’t be my ideal choice. And so my ideas churned in my head…until I decided on the two things to take the inspiration from for our wedding colour scheme…peacock feathers & orange gerberas!

With a relatively limited budget & my flair for making things, I knew I would be DIYing quite a lot of the wedding, with two types of wedding favours, the treasure chest, other bits & pieces & rather importantly….the cake! 

Thanks to my mum I’d grown up baking from a young age & as time went on developed a flair for cake decorating, which only in the past few years I’ve begun to develop further, baking & decorating cakes for friends & family for special occasions, but a wedding cake? Now that would be a challenge!

By this point I already had a couple of Lindy’s books & had made several purchases of equipment from the website, & was inspired by the eastern cake. The paisley design could look a lot like peacock feathers if using shades of teal, turquoise, purple, brown & lime & I loved the dramatic look of the tiered cakes made taller with the use of a separator, with a beaded topper. The bottom two tiers were fruit cake, with the upper two madeira, both Lindy’s recipes of course. The fruit cakes I baked a few months in advance & covered with marzipan & the base colour of sugar paste a couple of weeks before the wedding, then the Madeira cakes baked the week before. Then the decorating began…

Most brides tend to relax the week leading up to the wedding, but for 3 full days I was busy decorating the cake. Then the kitchen turned into a mass production line to produce over a hundred decorated cookies as wedding favours, vanilla & gingerbread, helped by my good friend, Leanne. These were teamed with packets of wild flower seeds, which my niece & I created with coloured paper. The tables were then colour schemed individually to tie in with the peacock feather & orange gerbera theme, the Brown table, the Purple table, Lime Green table, & the Orange table, with the top table being a mixture of all the colours featured including teal/turquoise & blue, with floral centerpieces & chair sashes to match the colour of each table (both our florist & the lady who covered the chairs for us had never seen such a mix of colours before & were so excited about such a unique wedding).

Then of course there was the dress! After many hours trawling through many bridal websites I came to the conclusion that I wouldn’t get a coloured dress unless it was a bridesmaid dress so I would have to look at a more specialized area. I had an image in my head of a Victorian style, bustled dress, with a corset style top & a jacket in a teal blue/turquoise colour, to be teamed with a little top hat adorned with a peacock feather. I found the wonderful Anna at Honey Bee Corsets who turned my ideas into a stunning reality. The 4 hour round trip to see her for fittings was so very worth it!

So how did this mix of bright colours actually translate into a beautiful wedding without looking like a complete car crash of colour? Well I hope the photographs show just how well it all worked together to produce a truly magnificent day – one my husband & I will never forget!”

What a fabulous story!  Take a look at how you too can make your own sugar peacock feathers and please – as ever – do share with us your sugar stories and creations.  Upload to our Facebook page or e-mail your pictures and cake stories to [email protected]

You never know, you might end up being one of our guest bloggers, just like Carol!

Happy Baking!

Lindy 🙂