A glasshouse in January, and seven tiers of sugar butterflies

The brief

They came to the studio in September with one photograph: a Victorian glasshouse at dusk, every pane lit from inside. Not a cake photograph. A room photograph. Anisha said she wanted people to look up when they walked in, and to keep looking.

The date was the first Saturday in January, which meant no daylight after four and a room lit almost entirely by candle. That decided almost everything about the cake before a single sketch was drawn.

Design

Why butterflies, and why blush

Candlelight is warm and it is low. White royal icing goes grey in it, and anything with a cool undertone dies completely. The cake was iced in a blush that reads almost white by day and turns to candle gold at night, which is the only time the guests would see it.

The butterflies came from Anisha's grandmother's sari, which had a scattered butterfly motif in silver thread. Two hundred were cut by hand, wired individually and dried over curved formers so each one sits at a slightly different angle. From across the room they read as a swarm rising off the cake. From a foot away you can see the veining.

Making

Six weeks, and the tier that nearly didn't happen

The third tier carries a monogram pressed in relief, an A and an N sharing a stem. It was modelled, cast, cracked, and modelled again. Bas relief on a curved surface wants to pull away from the icing as it dries, and the only fix is to make it thinner than feels sensible and accept that some of them will fail.

The arched niches on the base tier were piped freehand over four days. There is no mould for those. Each arch is a line of royal icing laid at a consistent pressure, and if the pressure changes, the arch changes with it.

The day

Setting up

The cake travelled in seven boxes and was assembled on site over two hours, which is the part nobody photographs. The florist had run a line of crimson and pink roses around the base plinth, and the two of us spent twenty minutes moving stems a centimetre at a time until the colour ran the same way as the butterflies.

It was cut at half past nine, in front of four hundred candles on the staircase behind it. By then the icing had picked up all the warmth in the room, exactly as the drawing said it would.