Weddingbee Blog

Cake is very important to me. It’s one of my favorite foods, in fact! But I’m no cake-snob: I prefer plain, ordinary cake white cake with buttercream frosting. The kind offices always serve for employee going-away parties. You know, the ones with all the excess frosting stuck on the plastic spatula?

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(Dirty little secret: I’m the corner-piece snatcher. And I’m the one who waits until everyone turns their backs, then scrapes that leftover frosting on to her plate. YUM.)

Since my taste in cake isn’t what anyone would classify as “expensive”, we’ve pretty much known all along that we have two options for our wedding cake.

1) Get one from the grocery store (they actually do really pretty cakes!)

or

2) Have a family friend make it (she makes great cakes, apparently).

I haven’t given our wedding cake direct thought yet, but at this point I was planning (in my head) on buying a little 8″ round cake or cupcakes from the grocery store to feed us and our handful of guests on the wedding day. Then, I figured that Jill* would make cake for the family barbecue a few days later.

The other day while chatting with FMIL, Mr. Mary Jane said to his mom, “So, should we contact Jill about the cake, or will you?” I’m pretty sure this is the first time either of us had really mentioned a cake plan out loud, so I was a little caught off guard. Like I said, I hadn’t even planned on getting Jill to make the wedding day cake.

I mentioned my idea of buying the grocery store cake for the day-of, and FMIL wasn’t having that. She insisted that Jill would love to do it, and it would be awesome. I don’t know Jill well at all, and felt a little weird about asking her to make us two wedding cakes - one of them probably pretty huge (for the picnic).

So we talked a little about cake. I said I was cool with plain cake, the plainer the better. No carrot, no rum filling, no cream cheese, no raspberry drizzle please. I prefer white, but Mr. Mary Jane likes chocolate, so I suggested chocolate cake. Mr. Mary Jane’s brother doesn’t care for chocolate though, so we will probably go with white. And buttercream icing. That was my only real specification. I must have buttercream icing on my wedding cake.

As far as the style? I didn’t care. Jill’s going through the work of making us this cake; she gets creative license. When a woman’s a cake expert and she’s doing it pro-bono*, you don’t tell her what to do. And when it comes to cake, the taste is what matters to me. What do I see here? Delicious cake. Ugly perhaps, but delicious. Obviously I wouldn’t imagine that Jill would make an atrocious cake wreck - I’m positive it’ll be beautiful - but you see my point, right?

FMIL is going to talk to Jill about the cake at some point this summer. When we’ve got it nailed down, I’ll update you. I’m very excited about homemade cake for our wedding!

Is your cake being made by a professional baker, a family friend, or someone in between? (Jill used to work with cake in her profession, so I think she’s the third option!) Or are you taking on the ultimate DIY of making your own cake?

*name changed