Janice Wedding Cake Sketch (Framed)

Premise

Each cake design is a journey into the imagination and in some ways, perhaps, a portrait of the mind of its maker.

Hi Janice!

I just want to take a minute to send over your cake concept. The concept of the cake is based largely on the mural we discussed of the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna by Johann Wenzel Bergl. The cake architecture/building is based on the door frame. The top dome will be made dimensional. To fill in the middle of what was an empty doorframe, I’ve borrowed from a different garden’s trellis work and copied it into the middle for that portion. I want to treat the entirety of the cake as a “trellis” basically, so the flowers make sense crawling or weaving in and out of it here and there. A sugar hollyhock is featured. The cake seems to be stitched together with blue morning glories here and there and pink sprays of roses. There is also an orchid and daffodil as this is a fantasy sort of design. The morning glories are shown just starting to climb and trickle up the center trellis. I did want to include a whimsical element and noticed a tiny monkey holding a watermelon (cucamelon would be more to scale) on one of the portions of the mural. I think the guests would have fun finding him and might give it a little touch of fun to break up any potential pretension and I feel like the flowers in themselves do that even without the monkey if he ends up being eliminated. But good to keep a sense of humor somehow if he could be hidden in and completed. The trellis work is very intricate and will all be hand cut and applied from sugar. Hopefully, with some shading and tonality like the Versailles building and the mural to give it some dimension. The sugar flower pieces will include some large scale like the hollyhock etc.

The base of what would be the cake stand/table has been discussed and we thought it might be good to treat this as a piece of art or garden architecture and build a plinth for it to stand on. So, I have included this. I borrowed it from the same image I used for the middle trellis work. I’ve liked this idea since I saw the cakes on museum pedestals and tables in an older Brides UK article. This would allow the guests to walk around the shape entirely. This would be table height. So, that is something to consider. We have a person that can do this.

The pedestal can be provided as I’m sure I would use it again. Let me know what you think! Overall, I wanted the cake to be a bijou trinket of sorts with all of this intricacy overlaid. I really love how it turned out!

The Bergl Rooms in Vienna's Schönbrunn Palace

The Berglzimmer (‘Bergl Rooms’) at Schönbrunn are a playful echo of this scientific engagement with exotic flora and fauna. These garden apartments on the ground floor of the palace are named after their creator, Johann Wenzel Bergl, who worked for Maria Theresa as a specialist in mural decoration ‘in the Indian, American or Japanese manner’. These depict an artistically-composed idealized natural environment consisting of exotic landscapes and idyllic garden scenery with an impressively colourful variety of plants and animals. The illusionistic effects blur the distinction between wall and ceiling, interior and exterior.
Martin Mutschlechner