The Chicago bakery produces one of their signature gravity-defying cakes, when Brenda and Nicole create a bridal shower cake for a tea party. This cake design is three beautiful teacups stacked one on top of another, topsy-turvy style. Chris at Christopher Garren's Cakes meets with a couple who wants a cake that will represent the "Steam Punk" motif of their wedding. "Steam Punk"? What is that?? As Chris finds out, it's a modern blending of the romantic costumes from the Victorian era with the science fiction of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, all powered by steam. LA's Merci Beaucoup bakery gets an order for a wedding cake that plays right into Marc's strengths. The couple wants color, fun, and butter cream. They also share a love of tattoo art. Marc, being the artist that he is, decides to push the design to include intricate airbrush work, and "koi" fish swimming on the layers. It's just a typical day at Merci Beaucoup.
The CakeGirls get an order for a "Pantry Shower" cake from a bride whose family fetes the newlyweds with a party that will fill their pantry. The idea is to give the couple all the ingredients they'll need for the recipe for a great marriage. Christopher Garren's Cakes gets an order to create a wedding cake inspired by the movie "Edward Scissorhands". It's a busy week for Chris, so he assigns his intern Kristen to take the lead on the cake. Lauri and the ladies of Cake Alchemy are tasked with creating a cake that pulls inspiration from the modern chandeliers at the reception site. Yet Lauri being Lauri, she not only wants to include elaborate sugar work and life-like flowers made of gum paste, but she wants to suspend the tiers on a support system that includes a lighting mechanism. What could go wrong?
Christopher Garren's Cakes meets with a couple who wants a wedding cake inspired by the movie "Breakfast at Tiffany's". The cake is black and white, with Tiffany blue accents, and has to feed 275 people. Mary, one of the owners of CakeGirls, is in heaven when she receives an order for an ultra modern wedding cake. This is her opportunity to test a technique that she's been dying to do: cover a tier with two layers of contrasting colored fondant, then cut a design out of the top layer so the bottom layer is exposed. New YorkCity's "Cake Alchemy" has just received an order for a white wedding cake adorned with orchids. But will that be enough of a challenge for Lauri and her team? Lauri ups the design with a chandelier stencil and pearls, to a wonderful effect.
LA's Merci Beaucoup Cakes gets an order to make an unusual Pirate Ship wedding cake, for a couple who got engaged in the Caribbean. Marc can't wait to create all the fantastic details for the ship made out of butter cream. Christopher Garren's Cakes is asked to create a bridal shower cake that will remind the bride and her girlfriends about when they used to hang out together at a local diner. So the All-American design includes a milk shake, a chocolate cake slice, and a giant cupcake. And since this is a Christopher Garren cake, all these elements will be stacked on top of one another, and look just like the real thing, only larger. Chicago's CakeGirls owners Mary and Brenda think it's time for Ben to take on more challenges. That's why he's going to create this Magnolia wedding cake from start to finish. We know Ben's great at the fundamentals. What's going to happen when he's asked to be more artistic? Will he conquer the airbrush? Or will it conquer him?
The mother of the groom would like Chicago's CakeGirls to create an offbeat wedding cake for an offbeat wedding, where the reception will be a picnic. This cake will have a red-and-white checkerboard pattern, blades of grass, ants, and the topper is a pig roasting on a spit. LA's "Merci Beaucoup Cakes" bakery meets with a bride who wants to incorporate the southern tradition of a groom's cake into their reception. Her husband-to-be is clueless as to what a groom's cake is. But since it's HIS cake, and his choice, he wants a cheesecake. And he wants it to look like: a wheel of cheese. Christopher Garren's Cakes gets an order for a wedding cake for a bride and groom who want bold colors, inverted tiers with a quilted pattern, and orchids. Chris follows the game plan...up to a point. As the design evolves, he realizes yellow calla lilies will be much better for the overall look than the white orchids requested by the bride.
The CakeGirls have just gotten an order for a groom's cake that must replicate the groom's vintage Mustang muscle car. Mary is thrilled, but not as much as Ben, who finally gets to work on a more masculine cake. Cake Alchemy receives an order for an incredibly tall, bejeweled wedding cake. The bride makes it known she wants bling, flowers, and something to "pop". At Christopher Garren's Cakes, Chris designs a wedding cake that is elegant, feminine, and understated (or as understated as Chris can be). Navy blue and white are the colors for the wedding, and the design elements include intricate layers of pleating as well as a draped fabric effect with a blue-stenciled pattern on the edge.
The Chicago sisters receive a challenge they can't refuse -- to create a bobble head groom's cake. The groom is a huge football fan and has his heart set on seeing this cake at his reception. Can Mary design a structure that will bobble, but not fall? At Merci Beaucoup Cakes, Reva creates a cake concept which marries the opposing masculine and feminine design requests from her bride and groom. So it's black & white stripes for the groom (named Taylor), and drapery and pink roses for the bride. Marc's background in fashion design comes in handy when it comes to making fondant "drape", now if only they can get the color right... Cake Alchemy has an order for a wedding cake with a custom stencil scroll pattern, and gum paste flowers. But it's summer in the city and Manhattan is in the middle of a heat wave. Will the fondant wilt before Lauri can even get it on the cake?
Christopher Garren's Cakes is asked to incorporate a fun, beach motif into a wedding cake. The clients trust Chris implicitly, and give him full creative license on the project. The only item they give him for design inspiration is a gift bag, which appealed to them because of its colors, clean lines, and flowers. Reva at Merci Beaucoup Cakes designs a large wedding cake that incorporates the"Masquerade" theme of the couple's wedding. The colors are bold -- black, white, and red. Lauri of Cake Alchemy has earned a reputation for making wedding cakes that are art pieces. Her client is a bride who has an unusual request: she wants to surprise her husband-to-be with a groom's cake inspired by a piece of furniture! But it's not just any piece of furniture, it's a whimsical and eye-catching footstool created by one of the groom's favorite design companies, MacKenzie-Childs.
Halloween weekend in Los Angeles can only mean one thing—the Day of the Dead. Marc and Reva get an order to do a wedding cake based on the holiday. The CakeGirls get an order for a champagne wedding cake: actually, one large cake depicting a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket, with 15 smaller replicas for the wedding party. Cake Alchemy owner Lauri is making an engagement cake for one of her favorite people in the world: her loyal and beloved employee, Stephanie. The cake (and engagement party) will be a surprise, so Lauri keeps Stephanie distracted by having her work on this mysterious client's cake.
LA's Merci Beaucoup bakery gets an order for a 40th Wedding Anniversary cake. The clients are two sisters, the daughters of the anniversary couple, who want Reva to create a cake that reflects the artistic life their parents have created for them. The party is going to be inspired by Alice in Wonderland, so the cake should reflect that as well. The CakeGirls in Chicago get an order from a bride and groom who want clean lines and minimal decoration. Brenda and Mary decide to work on this elegant, 5-tiered cake together. It's no secret that Lauri at Cake Alchemy loves to make skeletons. So when a couple comes in and orders a skeleton bride and groom for the top of their cake, Lauri is in her element. But Lauri won't be satisfied with just two skeletons, she wants a whole tier of festive skulls for this New York couple's Halloween wedding.
A couple seeks out Christopher Garren's Cakes to create a non-traditional wedding cake. In fact, they say they don't want "their mother's wedding cake". The couple specifically wants to incorporate Lotus flowers (because they reconnected at LA's Lotus Festival after first meeting in New York City), henna designs, and lots of color. Reva at Merci Beaucoup Cakes designs a wedding cake with dramatic draping effects in fondant, as a nod to the bride's interest in acting. At Cake Alchemy, Lauri meets with a client who only has one request for her wedding cake, and that's to incorporate the groom's last name, Swan, into the design. Sounds relatively simple, except Lauri always has to raise the bar: why make just one cake when you can make EIGHTY little ones instead?
Chris at Christopher Garren's Cakes meets with a woman who wants to wear her grandmother's wedding dress at her ceremony. The bride-to-be wants her cake design to reflect the vintage/antique feel of her wedding, and to also evoke her grandmother's dress. Lauri at Cake Alchemy meets with a couple who wants a modern wedding cake. Lauri suggests that to make this cake truly unique, they should deconstruct the cake into individual tiers, and place them side-by-side, rather than stacking the tiers. Reva at Merci Beaucoup Cakes meets with a couple who wants to pay homage to their South Asian heritage. They decide to go with a Bollywood theme for their wedding cake, and using that inspiration, Marc creates an incredibly colorful and over-the-top design. Each layer of the cake is decorated like a piece of exotic fabric, covered with intricate "embroidery" that's piped on by Marc and gets gilded with edible gold dust.