Weddingbee Blog

Shortly after our engagement I was itching to get one of our vendors booked - the baker! Seriously, this was the first thing we booked, because I LOVE wedding cake. I’m such a huge Martha Stewart Weddings fan, mostly for the cakes. So much so, that years ago I purchased a huge MS cake decorating set in hopes of making some fabulous cakes myself. Yeah… that’s still in the dream stage, but you can imagine my utter delight when I learned that Wendy Kromer, the woman behind most of Martha’s fabulous cakes, had a bakery two hours from my hometown in PA!! We were undecided if we would have our wedding in PA or CA at that point, but that just meant twice as many tastings, and Wendy Kromer’s Bakery had to be one of them!

Source

When I scheduled our tasting, I was told Wendy would be in NYC and someone else would be helping us with our tasting, much to my disappointment. So I wasn’t expecting to meet her when we went for our tasting, but when we showed up… she was there!

I was so excited, and I know she thought I was crazy, at first. How often could she possibly encounter wedding cake groupies? In all my excitement, I didn’t take a single picture with her, but here is a not quite as exciting picture of her storefront in Sandusky, Ohio.

We walked through the kitchen and into a tasting room with display cakes all around us. Then, they plopped this sucker in between us.

There were 8 different cakes (white, yellow, vanilla pound, red velvet, dark chocolate, mocha, spice, & almond), 15 buttercreams (regular, white chocolate, rum, orange, lemon, raspberry, passion fruit, milk chocolate, dark chocolate, mocha, hazelnut, chocolate hazelnut, peanut butter, & yolk), two curds (lemon & passion fruit), raspberry preserve, two cream cheese fillings (plain & caramel), ganache, and fondant—not the nasty fondant, but a marshmallow-y inoffensive fondant. We mixed and matched while I scratched down some tasting notes. Our favorites: spice cake with rum buttercream and chocolate cake with egg yolk buttercream.

Wendy was friendly, professional, and offered to draw some cake sketches if we signed on with her. Mr. Sunbeam really enjoyed the experience, which is amazing, since he’s not a cake person. Little did he know, admitting this was only encouraging my cake tasting frenzy! We left jittery from the sugar, really satisfied with the flavors she presented, and just a tad star struck.

(source)

Once we were back in CA, I made more tasting appointments right away. One worth mentioning is I Dream of Cake. This tasting was unique in that we picked up a sample box from the bakery. I barely got my foot the door, and instead, tasted alone at home. It was still fun, but I would have enjoyed thumbing through their portfolio while we tasted. In this case, we enjoyed some, and we disliked others. We felt the chocolate needed to be kicked-up a notch, and found the icing was strangely grainy. A few “okay” flavors were the lemon, although it didn’t live up to its “zesty” name. Also, the raspberry, which wasn’t tart at all. That said, if mellow fruit is your thing, you would have loved these. Our absolute favorite cakes were the caramel, the banana, and for Mr. Sunbeam, the coconut! I still remember the little crystallized bits of caramel in the caramel cake. Yum.

Flavors from the bottom left: “zesty” lemon cake with lemon cream icing, vanilla cake with caramel swirl, banana cream cake with walnut crunch, toasted almond cake with ground toasted almonds, coconut cream cake with coconut milk and flakes, vanilla cake with raspberry filling, vanilla and chocolate cake with mocha buttercream, and chocolate cake with raspberry filling.

We did a few other tastings, but in the end, I had to have a Wendy Kromer cake! So we signed on, and have been working with her to create the perfect Sunbeam wedding cake. We don’t have a final cake yet, but you can bet I’ll share it with you when we do!

What vendor were you most excited to book?! Did you have a unique cake tasting experience?