Wedding cake - a scary prospect realised

We're scarily close to the wedding, so last week I made the cakes *insert petrified face here* In our original plans wedding cake making seemed like a fun part of the whole DIY wedding thing, as those plans changed it became a necessary aspect of a thrifty wedding. Thank goodness for Sainsbury's basics is all I can say.

I put the fruit into soak back in January.  I used my Christmas cake recipe as it is always so well received (and I like it). Based on Ruth of The Pink Whisk's Boozy fruit cake, the dried fruit was soaked in ginger wine for 6 weeks, before being baked last week into two layers of a rich, boozy fruit cake.

We've got a guest list of 60 for the wedding so needed enough cake for everyone to have a slice. Working out how much cake we needed was a bit of a nightmare for me, but thanks to twitter and google I got there and made two layers: a 12 inch layer and an 8 inch.

My sister has kindly offered to make 2 Victoria sandwich cakes - one with raspberries and cream and one with lemon curd and mascarpone. We'll be using both cakes as pudding at the reception so thought it was only fair to offer an alternative to those of us who don't enjoy fruit cake.

This should give us plenty of cake (hopefully more than we need) which means that even though my Brownies and Guides are not be able to come to the wedding they will be able to have some cake - which, when you're 7 is a very important part of your Snowy Owl getting married.

I split the measurements into 2 sets, one for the big cake, one for the smaller one - M had to help me with quantities as I was certain I needed to halve the quantities of the original recipe again for the 12 inch cake when in actual fact I needed to double it. Which is worth being aware of if you're doing your own.