Wedding Blog

I had my cake tasting about 23 days ago, and I am just now ready to blog about it. I’ve been a little overwhelmed with the sickness I had (that I passed to everyone in close contact with me), and just wedding stress.

Anyway, here are the pictures of my cake tasting. I didn’t take any actual pictures of us tasting, as I was busy licking icing off my fingers, but here are the pics of the samples and the cake we’re getting. We had two choices for cakes in our package, Torrance Bakery and Hansen’s Cakes. I’ve had Hansen’s before and liked it, but I wanted something new. So, we set up our appointment at Torrance Bakery and prepared ourselves for the best part of wedding planning- eating the food.

Torrance Bakery has two locations, one in Torrance and the other in Gardena, but the wedding cake showroom is in Torrance. There are two separate stores at the Torrance location, separated by a few feet. The wedding cake showroom is two doors down from the bakery (where they have verrry tasty pastries and cookies and lunch during the week). My FMIL and I were directed towards the showroom, and although we were at least 10 minutes early, we were given bottles of water, their cake albums and the tray of cake samples to taste while we waited for our turn.

Torrance Bakery has three tables for tastings, available if you make an appointment. The room wasn’t very large, but there was a large amount of cakes on display. We were given six samples of their most common cake and filling combinations, and urged to look around. The album of cakes they had given me was very easy to understand, the pictures with a star weren’t included in our package and we’d have to pay more. Luckily, there were a ton of cakes that were beautiful and in our package.

Though it took us about an hour to really determine what we wanted in a cake, I had no problem choosing flavors. My favorite cake flavor is chocolate. Just plain chocolate, nothing fancy. When one of the samples was chocolate cake with raspberry mousse and buttercream frosting, I almost died. Mr. Kiwi’s favorite sweet is anything with chocolate and raspberry. My FMIL and I tasted their version and couldn’t have been happier. The cake was moist and not too bitter nor too sweet. The raspberry mousse had real raspberries (sad that I should be surprised, right?), and wasn’t too tart. The texture was light and felt fresh to taste. The buttercream was rich and definitely not too sweet, substantial but not mouth-coating with that waxy feel. That choice was made easily- we wanted two tiers to be that exact combination: chocolate cake with raspberry mousse and buttercream.

Here’s a pic of the chocolate cake

We then had to decide what to have for the smaller tiers, since I know not everyone loves chocolate as much as I do. The next flavor that we tried and loved was the carrot cake. As a person who hates carrots (now you know why I had cataracts! ), I LOVED this cake. Moist and not too sweet, the carrot cake would have been a top contender had I realized most people I know don’t like carrot cake. And yes, I know it’s not about pleasing everyone, but it matters to me, being a vegetarian who gets shrimp at weddings, instead of steak. Because THAT makes sense. Anyway, the carrot cake had cream cheese icing which I think I licked off on the way home. It was seriously fantastic, easily the best cream cheese icing I’ve ever had. It was a little too yellowish for me though, and definitely too meltable. The filling they paired with the carrot cake was pineapple mousse, which you’d think is an odd combination, but it was our favorite choice that day.

A pic:

Anyway, I decided that I wanted something a little more plain for the top tiers. I tasted the white/yellow cake and it was perfect. Not dry and not tasteless. You could taste the butter in the cake, and I figured it’d work well with a custard filling. That decision was made easily, and without much discussion.

They had given us these cake flavors: carrot, chocolate, yellow/white, banana and marble. Out of these, my least favorite was the marble, it just seemed boring. More boring than yellow? Amazingly, yes. The banana was fantastic, and I really loved it, especially when they paired it with custard. The fillings we were given with the cakes were all so tasty: fudge, fresh strawberries and whipped cream, pineapple mousse, custard, raspberry mousse and lemon mousse. Normally I’m a huge fan of lemon, but this was just too tart for me. Maybe with the banana cake it could work, with the white cake it was too overpowering, The same holds for the fudge, too thick and sweet for me. Of the icing choices we had: cream cheese (soooo good, but see the color below?). wedding white (which is like a thick grainy frosting, too much for me), buttercream and french cream. The french cream was very smooth and creamy, but had a taste/texture like cool whip. Eh.

Here is a picture of all the cake samples, we were told to bring them home to Mr. Kiwi (he loved it, cake with no trip to the bakery? Let’s have a wedding every year!).

Here is our cake, a picture taken at the showroom. Ours won’t be orange. And won’t have that stuff on top. And will have another tier.

Working with Torrance Bakery was great, they were very friendly and accommodating. I truly recommend them to anyone! To contact Torrance Bakery to make an appointment for a tasting, you can call them at (310) 320-2722 ext. 230, or email at weddings@torrancebakery.com. If you want to just stop by to look (an appointment is needed for tastings), you can find them at 1341 El Prado Avenue, Torrance, CA.

Definitely an A!!!