Weddingbee Blog

I absolutely adore cake, and I would eat it for every meal if I could (shh! Don’t tell the South Beach Diet people!), but we won’t be having one at our wedding. Sigh.

When we first started looking at wedding cakes, I got so excited thinking about all of the possibilities out there. Chocolate raspberry? Yes! Carrot Cake? Mmm hmm! A different flavor for every tier? Okay! We even found a baker we liked, so we sent her a picture of our dream cake, along with our budget, and she responded that it was all definitely doable. So, we had a cake tasting and we were thrilled! The cakes were delicious!

Here’s the dream cake photo we showed the baker. Photo from The Knot.

Yum. Cake goooood. Nom nom nom.

Unfortunately, we were floored (floored!) when we were given a quote of $7-$8 per person. That was waaaaay outside of our budget. We will have about 250 guests, so it comes out to quite a chunk of change. We just couldn’t justify spending so much money on dessert. We really hate wasting someone’s time, so we always talk about price upfront. I still don’t know what happened to cause the misunderstanding.

After that, we didn’t even bother to look up other vendors. We searched for alternatives, but nothing was standing out. We were bummed because we didn’t want to eliminate dessert or the traditional cake cutting/smashing all-together. Then, BAM! It hit us! Cupcakes! Well, cupcakes with a twist. When it comes time to cut the cake, Mr. Dumpling and I will have something like this just for the two of us:

Photo from Susan Lawrence

For the cupcakes, we decided that instead of a cupcake tree, we would have them passed around on silver platters to our guests by our wait staff. We found some really inexpensive ones at Target.

But, here’s where it gets sorta neat: with each cupcake, we will serve a “shot” of milk (soy milk for me)! We found these personalized shot glasses at Oriental Trading. At $11.99 for 50 and with free personalization, we couldn’t pass them up!

We found a great local bakery that can make just about any flavor of cupcake and is very reasonably priced. We were thinking about having a mix of carrot cake with cream cheese icing, chocolate with German chocolate filling, lemon with vanilla filling, and plain Jane strawberry.

Oh, I almost forgot—we won’t need to pay for serving plates or extra forks from the rental company either, because cupcakes can be eaten without them! Yay for saving money!

Is anyone else “cutting” the cake? I hope I don’t throw off some of our older guests. What do you think? Good idea or bad idea?