Every couple sends the same photograph, and it was taken in a room at nineteen degrees. Here is what happens to that cake at thirty one.
About four couples out of five send us the same kind of photograph: a tall pale cake with sharp corners and a swirl of piped work up one side. It is a beautiful cake. It was also almost certainly photographed in a country where the room was at nineteen degrees, and that is the whole problem.
Buttercream is butter, sugar and a little liquid. Butter is firm at twenty degrees, soft at twenty six and liquid at thirty two. A function room in Malé with the air conditioning switched on an hour before guests arrive is sitting somewhere in the high twenties, and an open courtyard in the afternoon is above thirty. What happens is not dramatic and that is why people are caught by it: the cake does not collapse, it slumps. The corners round off, the piping loses its edge, and at some point in the evening the top tier settles half a centimetre into the one below and the whole thing takes on a slight lean.
Ganache behaves differently because it is chocolate and cream rather than butter and sugar, and it sets to something much firmer. Fondant behaves differently again: it is a sugar paste laid over the cake, it holds a genuinely sharp edge, and in this climate it is the only finish we will promise a square corner on. Its weakness is sweating. A fondant cake taken out of a fridge into humid air gets a film of moisture on it for about twenty minutes, which is alarming if nobody warned you and harmless if somebody did. We do not refrigerate fondant cakes on the day for exactly that reason.
There is a middle option that most people end up choosing, which is ganache with fresh flowers. It costs less than fondant, it holds its shape all evening, and the flowers do the work that piping was going to do. The flowers go in at the venue, never at home, because a wired stem in a cake in a moving car arrives somewhere other than where it started.
If you want buttercream, have it indoors and have it cut early. We have made plenty of buttercream cakes for air conditioned rooms with a seven o'clock cutting and they were exactly like the photograph. What we will not do is take your money for a buttercream cake that has to stand in a courtyard from four until nine, because at nine it will not be the cake you paid for and you will be the one looking at it.
Tell us the venue and the hour. Everything else about the cake follows from those two facts, and the couples who are happiest with their cake are the ones who told us both in the first message.
