Mum bakes daughter a chandelier wedding cake that hangs from the ceiling
[Photo: D. Lacy Photography]
When Absolutely Edible Cakes owner Nikki Jackson made the cake for her own daughter Toddreana’s wedding, she knew she had to do something special. She didn’t exactly expect her creation — a 7-foot-tall glass-crystal chandelier that hung from the ceiling — to go viral instantly.
“I had other industry friends that were like, ‘I’ll do the cake and I won’t charge you,’ but I am such a control freak,” Jackson told Yahoo Style about her daughter’s Oct. 8 wedding to Anttwon Thames in Garland, Texas. “So I did her cake and all the food for the wedding. I could not let it go.”
[Photo: D. Lacy Photography]
Jackson has some experience with going big and going viral in the business. A life-size cake replica of a bride she made years ago still gets passed around every time sites discuss the craziest, most over-the-top confections ever made. This time around, she teased that her daughter’s cake would “shut Texas down.”
“When the cake lady daughter gets married, what the hell do y’all expect?” she joked.
But it was actually Jackson’s sister, event designer Kimberly Evans of Absolutely Elegant Events, who pushed the baker to go even bigger than she’d planned. When they visited the maker of the hanging cake stands, Fashion Proposals in Houston, Evans said the planned 24-inch stand was “killing my vision.” So the sisters designed their biggest hanging construction ever, at 36 inches wide.
[Photo: D. Lacy Photography]
[Photo: D. Lacy Photography]
Jackson said she wasn’t pleased with how her sister had made her blow her budget with that move. The other big expense was in using real glass crystals instead of the more common plastic kind. In the end, the cake, which could feed 600 (though the guest list was just over 400), cost about £3,600.
“I kept rationalizing with, I’m not paying for a caterer, I didn’t pay for an event planner, so I can splurge in other areas,” Jackson said. “That’s how I was able to make sense of it all.”
Toddreana Thames, who has been working with her mother since she was a girl, didn’t have any involvement in the process. Her mother gave her the week before her wedding off, so she didn’t see it until she walked into the venue. “I saw it from outside; it was just … it blew me away,” she told Fox 4 News.
It blew others away too.
“I had been telling the photographer, ‘When you see this cake, I will be trending by 5:45,’ ” Jackson said. “The wedding started at 5:30, so I knew I wouldn’t be, but I was saying it as a joke. The photographer came over to me at about 8 and said, ‘Hey, Nikki. You’re trending.’ I did not expect to wake up the next day and the cake had gone viral.”
After the wedding, Jackson brought the chandelier stand back to her store, and she has already received requests for similar creations. But she doubts she’ll have many customers go quite as big as she did for her daughter.
“Just like the life-size bride, it’s available,” she said. “Nobody really wants to spend that much for a cake.”
All photos courtesy of D. Lacy Weddings.
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