Inside the Making of a Life-Size Dress Cake

A highly talented self-taught baker, Reema Siraj is a thriving Dubai based Sri Lankan cake designer and instructor. She has been continually practicing to perfect her skills and now stepped up to teach her unique craft to equally enthusiastic bakers. After she received countless positive feedbacks, she was able to take her game to the global platform. She has been marking off milestones throughout her journey where she was even invited as a judge for Cake Talks Oman and to showcase a masterpiece for their annual exhibition.

“I was quite certain about what I was going to make. My fondness towards lace, pearls, and edible fabrics was the only factor that drew me to the idea of constructing a life-size wedding dress cake.

Heavy embellishments were fundamentally the focus of this one-of-a-kind cake, thus Reema needed inspiration from a dress that already was a fascinating piece. The renown cake designer stepped foot to hunt for inspirations and turned towards the exemplary designs of Ziad Nakad, a sensational wedding gown designer from Beirut, who specialises in eccentric fabrics and unconventional beading styles! Subsequently, Reema perused through Ziad Nakad's  2017/18 bridal dress collection.

The passionate artist was then stepping foot to the next stage - Bringing the sketch to life. She prepared a mood board using all the elements and textures she could possibly use in this project, and it indeed did help in deciding which elements suited the design best.

All the details in this dress were to be entirely handmade, thus Reema began by crafting the embellishments one by one. Starting with the delicate flowers, made of wafer paper with a center that contained varying sizes of edible pearls, was a tedious task. Over 2400 individual hand-crafted edible flowers were made for this enticing masterpiece. 

Lace was the main feature of this cake, with over 3000 individual lace flowers covering almost 90% of the entire dress - It was certainly the area that required the most attention to detail. Each flower that formed the lace design had to be individually cut and positioned on the dress in an orderly fashion to ensure the design was flowing and faultless. Next was the physical structure of the cake. The fact that it was a life-size wedding dress meant that this project was challenging. The buttons on the back of the gown were 94 in total, lining almost the full length of the dress, and each was handmade using balls of fondant, fastened into another 94 loops, identical to an actual button up back. Reema decided to document the entire process so that everyone could go through this beautiful journey with her. Apart from this, her future plans definitely involve sharing her knowledge and introducing the latest trends in cake-making to Sri Lanka.