Wedding Blog

When I first started planning, a lot of people gave me the advice to “choose what’s important to you, and spend the money there.” Great advice, right? The flip side of that advice is to choose what you don’t care about, and then skimp on it. Whoa now. That doesn’t sound like so much fun. Something had to go though. In a moment of disciplined budget-wrangling, I picked to throw the cake into the don’t-really-care-about-you category.

I mean really, cake? I’m not even that crazy about it (and believe me, Miss Tiramisu can put back some sugar products). Cake can be highly disappointing. You see it up there on its pedestal, all sugar coated, and you think it will taste as good as it looks. Or you read its buttercream frosted description on a dessert menu and start watering at the mouth. And a lot of the time what shows up on your plate is a crumbly mess coated with a too-sweet paste that makes your teeth hurt.

So cake it is. You’re out.

I was too traditional to throw out the cake altogether though, and for some reason cupcakes weren’t doing it for me. I stuck a figure into my prized excel sheet budget that allowed for $4 a slice. I thought I was being generous, and that when we finally decided on a cake, it’d be even less, causing Mr. Tiramisu to praise me for my frugal-ness. From there, I got a few recommendations from my wedding planner and made a few phone calls. The first cake option that we looked into was Confection Art. Owen runs this business right out of his home, but it’s no joke. This is art. Look at this stuff:

We got to try six cake flavors when we went for the tasting. Here’s my artfully set up plate: you can see that I forgot to take a picture until about my third bite of the first cake! Owen talked us through all the flavors, planned carefully like a wine tasting, from lightest to richest (my mom got a big kick out of this).

The piece that has a bite taken out of it is the vanilla cake with wild Maine blueberry whipped buttercream filling. Then heading clockwise we have vanilla cake with fresh raspberry whipped buttercream filling, pound cake with lemon buttercream filling, orange ginger carrot cake with cream cheese filling, chocolate cake with cappuccino filling, and rounding out the plate is bourbon chocolate truffle cake. These were all fabulous- not a crumbly mess nor a tooth-hurting frosting-bite in the bunch.

Our favorite was the white cake with the raspberry filling, but Owen said we could choose a different flavor for each of the tiers, so we added the bourbon chocolate, the carrot, and the blueberry. Then he flamboyantly described our masterpiece- “a five tiered, staggered squared, white buttercream surfaced, blue filagree piped, sugar paste hydrangea covered” dream of a cake. And it could be ours for the low low price of……..$!$!$!$!…….THUMP.

Mr. Tiramisu? Did you need help getting back in your chair? It’s really not polite to stare wide-eyed and mouth all open like that at our poor cake baker. Can’t you see this is a work of art? The man needs to support a family after all. Our guests will just die over this cake! It will all be worth it, and after all we only get married once!

So much for convincing myself that planning a wedding wasn’t going to turn me into a crazy person.

We didn’t actually end up going with the cake. In the end it was my mom that we had to talk out of it. She loved the place, the owner, his fluffy little dog, and all of the beautiful cakes. The next morning though, my mom and I hit up cake stop #2. I didn’t take any pictures, but they would have been much less exciting. No artfully arranged cake slices, no fresh brewed coffee or running slideshow of our cake options at no-nonsense cake stop #2. And wouldn’t you know we loved the cake more!? We chose vanilla with cream cheese frosting mixed with whole fresh blueberries and sliced strawberries, chocolate with ganache and raspberry preserves, and vanilla with lemon frosting mixed with whole blueberries.

Here’s the final design- picture it with all blue hydrangeas in place of the other flowers though- courtesy (for half the price) of the delicious European Bakery:

Do you see the cost-saving real flowers substituted for the sugar paste ones? And how it has just four tiers now? Did you notice we’re only choosing three flavors? Yeah, that’s because I totally don’t care about the cake.

Wink.