Flashback: Spice Up Your Wedding Cake!

As often tends to happen with wedding plans, everything goes wrong during the last week of the countdown. I suppose I was lucky that only a handful of things went wrong for me, but one of them was kind of major.

Two days before my wedding, I had no cake.

The cake I desired was very simple, and I had placed the order for it back in June, so I was thinking that very little could happen at this point. Tragically, the genius (yet elderly) cake decorator who had planned on completing my cake ended up in the hospital for a total of three emergency operations the Thursday before my wedding. Instead of the moist lemon cake laced with amaretto liquer that I had been expecting, I was now getting a last minute plain white cake from some lady whom I had never seen before in my life who my mom hooked me up with on Thursday.

Selfishly, I reasoned that if my cake were going to both look simple and taste simple, my wedding reception would be rather forgettable.

Against the wishes of parents and fiance who insisted, "People just don't do that," I prepared three small tubs of cake toppings, or fillings, as pastry chefs call them. One was raspberry, one was peanut butter fudge, and one was cream cheese. My intention was that guests would dollop these delicious substances onto their otherwise bland cake and be wowed. No one agreed with me. They said it was tacky and that not a soul would be impressed.

Well, here's how the cake looked:

And if only I could take a picture of how it tasted, because it was, indeed, impressive. People raved about it just as I'd always hoped the would about by reception. I didn't make a big deal out of being right since I didn't think it was a good idea to start out a marriage with an "I told you so."

Here is how to whip up for yourself two of these amazing fillings. The raspberry one was just Comstock canned raspberry pie filling. Note: These are smaller versions of the recipes than what I used for the reception.

Cream Cheese Filling
2 blocks cream cheese
3/4-1 cup powdered sugar (to taste)
1 tsp vanilla extract


Beat all ingredients until smooth. Keep refrigerated. Serve over cake, pie, pancakes, etc.


Peanut Butter Fudge Filling
1 (16 oz) jar hot fudge sauce
1 1/2 cups peanut butter
1 tsp vanilla extract

Soften fudge in medium saucepan over medium heat. Add peanut butter and mix well once melted. Add vanilla extract and remove from heat after stirring. Store at room temp and heat up before serving. Serve with ice cream, pancakes, cake, etc.

Like I said, these go great on top of cake or sweet biscuits or certain pies, but if you were making a cake from scratch, they would be a perfect filling.

Not to be petty, but I did tell them so ;-)