Pandemic Wedding: A Creative Way to Celebrate

COVID-19 has certainly thrown a wrench in all of our best-laid 2020 plans. Holidays, graduations, family milestones, and other events have been cancelled or postponed all over the world. This post is a little different, as this is more focused on my personal story in celebrating a milestone in pandemic times.

Our Pandemic Wedding

My husband and I are one of those 2020 couples with a pandemic-upended wedding. We planned to be married in July 2020 in New York City. As NYC shut down in March, we felt it was important to be legally married in such uncertain times. We quickly went to the city clerk and got married. We were fortunate to have a close friend witness our marriage, considering the circumstances. Afterward, we went right back home and spent the afternoon watching Netflix. All this happened just in time as the city clerk’s office closed the next day! We figured our July celebration would be postponed, and it is…hopefully it will be safer in Fall 2021.

When July came around, we wanted to mark our original wedding date with a small celebration. We decided to bake a small wedding cake and have a “bring your own dessert” party via Zoom with our families. It was a nice way to finally mark the event—with the advantage of everyone liking their chosen dessert! 

Cake Recipe

Our wedding is supposed to have a lavender theme (all other details are top secret!), so my husband and I searched for a lavender-flavored layered cake recipe. We decided on a lavender earl grey cake by Amy Ho of Constellation Inspiration. Please see the recipe (and many others!) here.

To make the cake a bit more special, we customized the recipe slightly. We halved the recipe and were left with enough for three cake layers while skipping the six cupcakes. Food coloring was abandoned in favor of a bright white icing. Lastly, we added more lavender to the icing for extra flavor.

Process (Cake Baking 101) 

Neither of us had ever made a layered cake before, and truthfully it had been years since I had to ice anything. Thankfully, I double-checked the recipe the night before—and checked the time needed for the cake to cool before being iced. According to my research, it takes at least three hours for a cake to cool—overnight is even better. So our timeline for our 3pm Zoom celebration meant that we had to bake the cake immediately in the morning and then hopefully it would be cool enough to ice by 1pm or 2pm. 

I barely remembered to set the butter out on the counter to soften overnight, but thankfully I did. It was perfectly ready for mixing in the cake batter, starting at 8:30am. I used the grounds from some earl grey tea bags along with culinary lavender buds. More on culinary lavender coming in a future post! 

My husband was in charge of lining the cake pans with parchment paper. We recommend using parchment paper to line pans for all baking. It keeps the food from sticking to the pans and minimizes the cleaning process. 

By mid-morning the cake had finished baking and we let it sit in the pans for several hours on a baking rack. Just after 1pm, we checked it and found it to be fairly cool. We decided to try to ice it at that point. 

Layering 101

We noticed one problem immediately. Each layer was slightly rounded at the top, making balance an issue. Next time we bake a layered cake, we will have to attempt to solve this problem. Our solutions include cutting the very tops of each of the lower layers to make them flat or intentionally making the batter concave on top prior to baking. However, we fixed the balance as much as possible with the icing. It was a massive cover up!

We iced the bottom layer first, then stacked the middle layer on top and iced the top of that layer too. After that, we topped it off with the final layer and the balancing fun began. The middle layer kept wanting to slide and we had to keep checking the cake at all angles to make sure it wasn’t leaning while we iced the sides. Eventually everything was iced and fairly straight! Operation cover up was a success.

Decorating 101

In our planning process, we decided we didn’t want to do any extravagant decorations. We planned to spell the first letter of our names on top with fresh blueberries and then scatter lavender buds from a dried culinary lavender bouquet around that. However, with the cake finally made, the blueberries just didn’t seem right. They were just too big and bulky. So we stuck with the lavender buds and branches, making delicate patterns on top and around the sides. It was simple, beautiful, and edible! 

Sticking the individual lavender buds on was a tad difficult with our fingers, so my husband fashioned a lavender branch from the bouquet to act as a “bud placer.” A tiny amount of icing at the tip of the branch ensured that the bud would stick long enough to to be placed on the cake. Each bud had to be pressed into the icing slightly to stay in place. 

Results 

We found the cake to be delicious! The cake itself had a stronger earl grey flavor with the icing having more lavender flavor. I was personally happy to have added more lavender to the icing than required, as I prefer a stronger lavender taste. If you want more lavender flavor in the cake, then I would recommend adding approximately a tablespoon of ground lavender to the cake batter in addition to what is in the recipe. 

Just as a warning, once we came down from our sugar high, the lavender had a soporific effect! Perhaps some coffee on the side would have been a good idea? 

If you are looking for a cake recipe that is outside the normal flavors, I would recommend trying this one. It is tasty and certainly unique—definitely something to be talked about amongst your guests for a time!