I’m finally back to the wedding cake planning! I’ve decided to schedule in a few more cake flavour testings within the next month and a half, and hopefully I’ll have my wedding cake flavour by the end of this year. I am getting very antsy about getting a move on with the next steps — such as planning the design of my cake + my dessert table layout/menu. As we get closer and closer to the wedding date, the more I become excited about the wedding. I’m trying to keep it together, and hold all my emotions together so that I can save my excitement for the actual date/the days leading up to it. I initally didn’t think I’d be the type of person to dream about my wedding, and get giddy over church ceremonies, dresses, cakes, or parties, and here I am, slowly becoming more obsessed about colour themes, and minute details about my hair or the decor, or whether or not the theme/tone of my vows will match my fiance’s.

Weddings are a huge part of your life, and sometimes they can be a little bit of a money-grab business, so in order to keep it special while still maintaining a budget, I am gladly creating my own wedding cake and dessert table. Before I can even get a move on with those, I’m still in the process of figuring out what I want my cake to taste like. So far I’ve done a milk tea cupcake, coffee mocha cupcake, and now I’m doing a matcha black sesame cupcake. This is partly because of a suggestion by one of my beloved subscribers, but also because I’ve had a growing love for the flavour of black sesame since my trip to Philippines (and the 5 scoops of black sesame ice cream that I devoured during that trip).

So to reminisce on all the black sesame desserts I’ve eaten, I was able to make a matcha green tea cake base, filled with white chocolate black sesame ganache, and topped with Italian meringue buttercream that I flavoured with the black sesame and vanilla extract. This flavour combo has been one of my most recent favourites, and the greatest thing about this cake combo is that it is filled with a ganache as opposed to a custard (which is way less shelf-stable). Since I’m having a summer wedding, I’m trying to factor in all the possibilities of what could go wrong/what would be best for a summer wedding cake.

For my black sesame buttercream I did 1/2 a recipe of my buttercream recipe, added 1 tsp of pure vanilla extract, then I added in 4 tbsp or 28g of toasted, ground, black sesame seeds, which I picked up from my local asian grocery store. Alternatively you could just toast your own black sesame seeds on a dry nonstick pan until they start to pop, and they smell aromatic and nutty. Toasting is optional but it does add some amazing flavour. Then you can crush your sesame seeds in a spice blender, or clean coffee grinder, to get them ultra fine, so you can start adding them to your desserts!

Here’s the recipe for the ganache, and feel free to watch the video tutorial below!