17 March 2020
Thought #TheSomhaleUnion wedding was OTT? Wait until you hear about the cakes!
Somgaga recently told the press that it was actually his love, Mohale Motaung, who made the most outrageous requests for their two weddings. “He wanted a 30-tier cake. He wanted to arrive on a horse cart with 12 white horses,” Somizi Mhlongo shared with Channel24.
While everyone pondered the physics of a 30-tier cake, we called up Kelly Jayne’s Cake Boutique, the mother-and-daughter duo behind the wedding cakes at the couple’s traditional and white weddings, to get the details. As you might expect, these wedding cakes were one-of-a-kind.
Watch: Living the Dream with Somizi Season 5, coming to Showmax on 4 May 2022
Anything but traditional
“When they came in for their cake tasting, Somizi told us he wanted an upside-down wedding cake for their traditional wedding in Kibler Park,” says Kelly.
“We created two upside-down cakes for Somizi that were five tiers each and suspended from the ceiling. Between the two hanging cakes was Mohale’s cake, that had 10 tiers. Each tier was a different flavour and the flavours they chose were crème brûlée, death by chocolate, coconut and lemon, salted caramel and whisky, and Amarula.”
The cakes were covered in fondant icing, all-white with edible gold leaf, says Kelly, who has been running her baking business for the last nine years from their studio in Northlands Decor Park in Randburg.
The cake for the white wedding
“The colour scheme for Somhale’s wedding in Muldersdrift was all white, and the cake had to match,” said Kelly. “Somizi wanted the cake to look like it was floating in the air.”
The nine-tier cake was suspended in a Perspex box for all 240 guests to see.
How do you cut and serve a wedding cake that’s in a floating box, we wanted to know. Apparently, there are all sorts of trade secrets at a lavish wedding like this one.
Kelly confides that the wedding cakes are always transported to the venue in separate layers before they are assembled on-site. There’s a separate cake kept in the kitchens – all the same flavours and frosting chosen by the couple – that’s served to the guests after the official cutting of the cake.
More delicious details
There were no old-fashioned cake toppers on the wedding cakes, but the couple did have their initials in gold on top of the cakes for the traditional wedding.
Kelly estimates that it took 15 people to make all of the cakes, both those on display and the cake served to the wedding guests. She guesses they used well over 1 000 eggs to make all that deliciousness.
This is not the first celebrity celebration that Kelly Jayne’s Cake Boutique has baked for: they also made Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s 80th birthday cake and baked a special cake for Carte Blanche as well. Kelly says the most common favour that couples ask for is carrot cake.
To experience Somizi & Mohale: The Union, binge-watch the four-part hit show exclusively on Showmax.
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