Weddingbee

It’s been nine months since our initial meeting with Scottsdale baker Ella of Classic Cakes and Confections. A lot can happen in nine months. Such as realizing that it’s a logistical nightmare to a commission a wedding cake from a shop two hours away.

Particularly when the shop can’t deliver, leaving us with the options of inconveniencing a friend or hiring a courier service. Neither really seemed an attractive choice, so we decided we’d better scrap plan A and check out the local cake scene.

First stop, a tasting at a local bakery, where we weren’t particularly impressed with either the cake or the service: a bored assistant who had no clue who we were deposited us in a corner of the shop and then disappeared. We sat at a plastic-covered desk with a printout of the various cake flavors taped to it. The assistant reappeared and plunked down a few slices of dry cake on the corresponding “flavor key” beneath and left us again. We ate off of paper plates and used the plastic forks from a nearby caddy.

Eventually, the owner made her way in. She was very nice, but she said she’d have to speak with her cake “sculptor” about the fondant-style design we had in mind. That was a week ago, and she’s yet to call.

In the meantime, we met with Jaynie Maxfield of Ambrosia of Tucson, who I just discovered in Tucson Bridal Magazine. Jaynie has only been in Tucson for about a year, and works out of her (quite cozy!) home. But she clearly runs a professional operation. She welcomed us in and immediately served us a sample of her most popular chocolate cake. How was it, you ask? In a word, phenomenal:

It was the most incredibly moist and homemade tasting scrumdidly-umptiousness, oh my lordy. It doesn’t even taste like wedding cake. It tastes like grandma’s cake.

We were massively impressed with Jaynie, and really liked her upbeat, involved attitude. She’s clearly very passionate about her work; she’s been making cakes for forty years and even wrote a book:

She was excited about our project, and we spent about an hour bouncing ideas around and trying to come up with a fun, edible interpretation of our wedding theme:

seeking Mr. Lovebug’s stamp of approval

And here’s a rough sketch of where we’re headed:

The bottom layer will have sugar typewriter keys spelling out “The Sweetest Type”, with a sheet of typewriter “paper” rolling out of it that will say “love” in a typewriter font. The middle and top layers will have pink and silver, candy-shaped swirls and dots. But my favorite element is how she had the thought to separate our lovebird caker toppers, in a sort of Romeo and Juliet-style pose.

We’re going to stop by her place again this weekend to taste some fondant and other cake flavors. Plus, Jaynie asked me to drop off some paint chips in the colors of our wedding so she can be sure and match the fondant perfectly - a great idea, I thought.

Anyway, we’re absolutely delighted to have found her, since as far as we knew, our options were really limited here in town.

Anyone finding themselves locked in to a particular vendor, by virtue of it being the only vendor of that sort in your city?

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