When my good friend Ian announced several months ago that he was holding a big pot luck to celebrate his marriage last summer to Lindsay (now a new good friend), I wanted to do something that captured their shared interests. But what?

They’re both outdoorsy types (they did, after all, have their ceremony at a cottage where Lindsay was brought to the alter by canoe), and they are also big into food and agriculture (food being the initial bonding point for Ian and I back in university). So given these passions, the chance to potluck, and my love for baking, I thought what better way to encapsulate their love for food and nature than through cake?

That’s how it started. And as is common for me when I get my creative cap on, ideas snowball and a big honking project is born – a project that is guaranteed to be bigger than I anticipate. But if there’s one thing I’m always happy to get in over my head with, it’s cake.

The final product? Three multi-tiered wedding cakes that embodied stages of a plant’s growth: from soil, to seed, to roots, shoots, and fruits.

Cake #1: “Compost Cake” a.k.a. Vegan Chocolate Cake

Ian is one of the founding members of FoodCycles (which I blogged about here) and is an organization devoted to growing good soil through a mid-sized urban composting facility in North Toronto. So a compost cake seemed apropos. But everyone I told my plan to immediately thought it was gross and suspected real compost as an ingredient. If it was really a compost cake, it wouldn’t be vegan though ’cause of the worm poo. I tried out a couple of chocolate cake recipes the week prior and enlisted coworkers as taste-testers. I thought the first test-cake was crap but it’s funny how people are prone to positive feedback when being fed free cake. Taste-testers’ dubious honesty noted. Although the cake recipe I finally went with worked pretty well, it was the icing that was really…um…the icing on the cake.

Cake #2: “Seed Cake” a.k.a. Lemon Poppy Seed Cake (Vegan & Gluten-free)

I am pretty stoked about how this cake turned out. I altered a vegan with-wheat recipe using my new GF Flour replacement recipe and found a raw lemon-cashew frosting that tasted great. I can’t say that making this cake vegan and gluten-free was entirely selfless. But I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one who was glad I did it. I tested this recipe out in advance and it didn’t hang around for more than 24hrs. It’s a good thing this was the only one I could personally test.

Cake #3: “Roots, Shoots, and Fruits Cake” a.k.a. Carrot Raisin Cake

Just in case the audience wasn’t into the vegan and gluten-free cakes, I wanted to have a ‘safe bet’ cake up my sleeve. And nothing says guaranteed-goodness like a carrot cake with cream cheese icing. This cake was the antithesis to Emily-friendly. Ravenna, my partner in crime for the cake operation, even made chocolate fruits & veggies to decorate the side of the cake with. Ian actually has an allergy to food colouring so we told him not to eat the chocolates. I hear giving the groom an allergic reaction at his wedding party is frowned upon.

In Sum…

The bake session went great. Thank you to Ravenna – who eagerly offered to help and was a life saver on a number of occasions over the past 2 days. She turned out to be the best co-chef too, as she took the initiative on the chocolate decals (something I don’t think I would have had patience for) and she is also less of a perfectionist than I am which really comes in handy when you need to leave the building in 15 minutes and you haven’t iced the cakes or cleaned up yet. (yikes!) A big thanks to all my cake testers at work…you really pulled through in a pinch. And to Sahar for lending us the how-to-guide for fancy cake making, and then stepping in mid-bake session to tell us we’d need to add an interior support structure or else the upper layers would crush the lower cake…and our morale.  (Apparently we should have read that book more thoroughly.) Finally, two thumbs up to Ian and Lindsay – two truly inspiring people full of smiles, laughter and love for each other and everyone around them.