White Flower Cake Shoppe owners Marianne Carroll and Lauren Bozich spent a whirlwind two weeks with camera crews from WE TV's Amazing Wedding Cakes as one of four bakeries featured on the fourth season of the reality show. On Sundays at 10 p.m. through May 29, you can catch the Beachwood-based bakers creating wedding cakes, such as the challenging Leaning Tower of Pisa. Designed for a duo who wanted to relive their Italian engagement, the cake is full of intricate pieces, parts and one fussy crooked tower. "This was a sculpted cake on an enormous scale, and everything needed to be of equal caliber," Carroll says.
A: Wood Impression
To give the chocolate-peanut butter crate cake a rustic Tuscan look, Bozich and Carroll imprinted pieces of fondant with real wood planks.
B: Cracking Up
The red ribbon is more than a decorative touch of fondant. It's hiding a crack that snuck up when the delicate red velvet cake couldn't stand the pressure of edible airbrushed paint. "That's the thing with decorating," Carroll says. "You have to know when to cover the mistakes."
C: Snap, Crackle, Pisa
The iconic Italian tower was constructed using marshmallow-coated rice cereal and an electric drill to sculpt its shape. "We knew that if we used cake it would have ended up buckling because cake is so much heavier," Carroll says. "We didn't want to use Styrofoam or anything like that. We wanted to prove that we can do everything edible."
D: Tough Metal
A 30-inch metal pole attached to a wood board allows the edible leaning tower to defy gravity.
E: Full Flavor
The third cake flavor — yellow — comes in the shape of a wheel of cheese. The rest of the sculpted items, from ring to grapes to lemons, are molded fondant.
F: Clocking In
The entire scene took nearly 30 hours for a team of five to create, much longer than the average wedding cake, which takes eight, Carroll says.
