WEDDING IN BLUE MOUNTAINS

Happy Monday!

When Lucie called me she was getting married in Blue Mountains and wanted me to bake something for them, I got excited straight away. After she told me the wedding was gonna be next weekend and I would end up baking 250 European pastries, 4 apple Strudels and a huge 3-tier wedding cake, I realized this was going to be crazy.

With working full time Monday to Friday and baking only in the evenings or on the weekends in my one and only pretty ordinary oven, my schedule was pretty tight. Also considering pick up on Saturday at 06am, I knew I wouldn't get much sleep Fri-Sat. And I was right. Going to bed at 1am, getting up at 2am. A lot of fun. IT TRULY WAS!

'MEDOVNIK' is a traditional Czech cake. It originally comes from Eastern Europe and its production started many decades ago. It is a layered cake with caramelized condensed milk and butter icing, all covered in cake and walnut crumbs. Medovnik takes a long time to make as each layer of the cake is baked individually and then assembled together with the icing. I made this three tiered cake for the wedding during the week as I knew I would not have any time on Friday evening or Saturday morning to finish it off. Bottom cake (25cm), middle cake (20cm), top cake (15cm). Decorated with two medovnik hearts.

APPLE STRUDELS. Beautiful pastries with apples, cinnamon, vanilla sugar, walnuts and raisins. Iced with icing sugar. 4 Strudels started my Friday night baking. Yum!

'WEDDING KOLACHE' These just need to be at every Czech wedding. Quark mixture with raisins is wrapped inside each of these little cuties. Topped with sugar/flour/butter/ crumble. 200 pieces of wedding kolache were made and finished on late Friday night.

'KOLACHE' are Czech traditional sweet pastries. Different parts of the Czech Republic have different recipes and fillings. These are Moravian ones filled with poppy seeds mixture, Quark mixture, powidl jam or walnut mixture. 50 of these were made on Saturday early early morning.