QUEEN OF CAKES
My royal masterpiece had a police guard
Fondly known as the Queen of Cakes, Fiona Cairns was responsible for baking the most famous cake in recent history − for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s wedding in 2011. The spectacular eight-tiered, nearly one metre-tall creation weighed nearly 100kg and took Fiona and her team six weeks to make. “It may have been the most stressful thing I’ve ever done, but the hardest thing was walking away from the cake,” admits Fiona. “We’d put so much love, time and devotion into it that it brought us all very close together. So it was a really emotional moment when it all ended − I even cried.”
As excitement surrounding Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding reached fever pitch, it’s no wonder that a slice of royal wedding cake can command a small fortune. Some 4000 slices of William and Kate’s cake were sent out as gifts, with one slice selling for more than $11,000 at an auction in California.
“We’d never made a cake like that before,” says Fiona (63), who runs a bakery near Leicester with her husband Kishore. “We’ve been asked to copy it many times, but we’d never ever do that because it was bespoke and unique.”
The elaborate design featured impossibly delicate scrollwork, leaves, sprigs and sprays based on the language of flowers (which explains the symbolic meaning behind different blooms), and even mirrored the intricate lacework of Kate’s wedding dress.
Meanwhile, Harry and Meghan bucked the royal tradition of a fruitcake with intricate icing, instead opting for an ultra-fashionable lemon and elderflower wedding cake with buttercream icing, topped with fresh flowers. It was made by pastry chef Claire Ptak, owner of London-based Violet Bakery.
The buzz that surrounded Harry and Meghan’s wedding cake brings back vivid memories of the phone call that changed Fiona’s life. “Kishore received the call from Clarence House at 4.30pm on Friday, February 18, 2011 − it’s etched in my memory. He said, ‘We’ve been asked to make the royal wedding cake.’ It still
sends shivers down my spine.”
For six weeks, Fiona and her clever team, led by design director Rachel Eardley, locked themselves away in her bakery while they meticulously planned the design, structure and execution of their creation, which had 17 fruitcakes with 900 handcrafted sugar paste flowers.
“The team all had to sign confidentiality agreements and couldn’t tell their partners. We had more than 80 people working in the bakery at the time, so we pretended we were on bakery night preparing a wedding cake for a Harrods’ window display,” says Fiona. “We even had the local police do nightly checks to help with security.” Fiona’s been supplying cakes to Harrods, Fortnum & Mason, Selfridges and Waitrose for years, as well as catering for rock royalty − Sir Paul McCartney orders his Christmas cake from her each year, and she’s made cakes for Bono, Pink Floyd and Simply Red. But it was the royal wedding cake that put her under the global spotlight.
She’d already been on the royal radar for some time, though. “My husband knows the Middleton family as we make the cakes to order through their Party Pieces company. Also, I once presented a cake to Prince Charles at Fortnum & Mason. I know the royal family are all fans of our fruitcake,” says Fiona.
Nonetheless, the initial meeting to pitch for the royal wedding cake was nervewracking. “Before we got the commission, we met Kate and her PA, who was helping organise the wedding. Kate told me she had my book [Fiona’s written three, the first being Bake & Decorate, published in 2010]. She had very firm ideas about what she and William wanted. She wanted it all to come together as a story with her dress, Westminster Abbey and the flowers. So we showed her our ideas − then waited nervously for the next four days.” After that fateful phone call, all hell broke loose in Fiona’s bakery.
“We put together mood boards of drawings to scale,” Fiona recalls. “Kate wanted tons of cream, so we did icing samples in different shades and lots of samples of fruitcake. She sent a swatch of lace to copy, but we had no idea it was from her dress. We also created 17 sugar flowers that had a special meaning, from sweet William to myrtle, which symbolises love and marriage. We were told lily of the valley was the
most important, but we didn’t know it would be in the Abbey or that Kate would be carrying those flowers.
“It was actually Kathryn Boyden, the royal pastry chef, who made the lily of the valley flowers for the top of the cake. I asked her if she’d have liked to make the cake and she said, ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly − I’m far too busy with the wedding banquet. But I’d like to be involved in some way.’ So she made the amazing flowers.”
There wasn’t enough time for the team to make the entire cake as a trial run. “When planning a tiered cake, the structure is as important as the cake itself. It’s a trade secret how Rachel Eardley designed the eight tiers, but we had lots of trials, starting with polystyrene shapes to get the proportions right.
“We did experiments for each tier, working out which ones we had to pipe with icing and which we had to make decorations for, which would be stuck on.”
The room in which the cake was to stand was also a vital consideration too, says Fiona. “Kate said we had to visit the room where the cake was going to be displayed − the Picture Gallery at Buckingham Palace, which has huge ceilings. It could have easily been dwarfed.”
Fiona and her team packed the cake and trimmings into 40 boxes and took them in an unmarked van to the palace, where they worked for two and a half days in a room over the kitchen to assemble their masterpiece. “We had to put the cake on a trolley to move it to the next floor and into the Picture Gallery. It was partly stacked by then, but I carried the top three tiers myself because I didn’t trust anyone else to do it.”
They were told to finish by 1pm the day before the wedding as the official photograph was going to be taken. “The photographer insisted on climbing onto a ladder to take the photos, but I was terrified his camera would fall into the cake. And as if there wasn’t enough going on that day, I was told Her Majesty would be coming to visit us,” laughs
Fiona. “The Queen talked for a long time and said some lovely things about the cake. She thought it was funny we’d had to take a door off at the palace so the cake could fit through once we’d assembled it.”
Fiona says she was unable to relax until she’d received the official thumbs up. “I did hear on the day of the wedding that the cake was beyond their expectations, and it was only then that I could enjoy a glass of Champagne,” she says.
While Fiona may charge up to $40,000 for bespoke commissions worldwide, she’s only too happy to share her cake decorating wisdom with readers of the Weekly.
“If you haven’t made a wedding cake before, keep to a single tier and a simple design,” she advises. “Something simple and beautiful is far better than trying something complex and getting really stressed.”
Fiona’s business started out as a kitchen table enterprise after she left art school, where she trained as a graphic designer, and went on a cookery course “because I couldn’t cook”. She started work as a pastry chef at the Michelin-starred Hambleton Hall, in Rutland, spending her spare time perfecting her cake baking and decorating skills. She and Kishore set up their company more than 25 years ago and now produce more than two million cakes a year.
Many people find the idea of cake decorating intimidating, but Fiona insists anyone can do it. “Start with the easy designs, break each stage down and don’t rush. You can bake cakes in advance − most freeze well − then decorate them when you have more time,” she says.
“And don’t be afraid of making mistakes. My worst disaster was when I baked a huge chocolate cake for dessert at a friend’s New Year’s Eve party and I took it out of the oven before it was properly baked. So I cut out the uncooked part and used a round cutter to make 14 individual cakes with the rest, then decorated them so nobody was any the wiser!”