The Wedding Cake project occupied a week of our lives and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. The requirements of this project dictated that our wedding cake must have:

*3 tiers (it can be a Madhatter cake, the tiers can be centered or cornered.)
*Covered in rolled fondant
*Lacework. Lacework is some sort of design piped out in royal icing on wax paper or parchment, peeled off the paper when it's dry, and stuck on the cake at an angle.
*Runout work. That's sort of a stained glass idea; you pipe a framework in royal icing, dilute the icing, and then fill in the frame once it's dry.
*Filligree. Filligree is the art of scribbling in a decorative fashion. It sort of looks like embroidery when you're done.
*Gum Paste Flowers (3 large, 12 small).

Despite the very strict guidelines, there was a lot of varyance in our cakes. Many of these rules are open to artistic interpretation, and we stretched the rules as far as they'd go. These are not actual cakes, but styrofoam dummy cakes. In the practical world, we would not have more than a day or two to work on these, but we needed something stable for our first ever attempt. We turned out some pretty darned good work, for a group of folks who've never done a wedding cake before. Our Chef Instructor proudly informed us that there was not one cake in the lot that he would not consider sellable in a bakery.

My god, were we proud of ourselves.

My design underwent several changes, especially after I realized how difficult the rolled fondant really was to deal with.

Yeah, the corners don't line up.  And this is not at all the cake I had planned when I started.  But I was becoming a mistress of improvising when things went wrong.