Weddingbee Blog

I never really told the hive about our first baker. She was new and up-and-coming in Baltimore, and her shop was down the street from where I lived in college. She had delicious cream puffs infused with lavender and heavenly chocolate tortes, and though she had just opened a few months prior to our visit, she said she was offering wedding cakes. At the time, we let her know we’d be leaving the country soon and we preferred to sign a contract and place a deposit ASAP. A month passed without a response, and when I’d contact her, she’d ask all the same questions that had been answered and re-ask for the design file. Then? nothing. I repeated that process 2-3 times before finally giving up in March. After I returned to the US, she contacted me asking for the details, specifics, and design files. By then, I’d had enough. I’d already moved on to the idea of a cake buffet, and felt so frustrated at that point with her service. Here I was, trying to give her money and a contract, and I kept getting blown off or stalled. The good news? I experienced her inattentive behavior prior to signing the contract or giving her any money, so it was 100 times easier to walk away from our verbal agreement.

I figured I’d try the one last baker in my area, Sweet, in Ellicott City. We met with Tracey (the cake baker) and while I at first felt guilty that I was taking up her time to discuss a cake buffet rather than one giant, cool, wedding cake, she quickly put me at ease and there were tons of details I hadn’t considered.

We spent about an hour discussing sizes, servings, colors, designs and placement. Poor Mr. D leaned over at one point and whispered, “I just want to eat cake!”

I’m glad we used that time to go over the details and specifics, because we were able to make several decisions and leave it at that. Yay for making decisions!

Then we moved on to Mr.D’s favorite part - eating cake! We tried many different combinations. The cakes will have three layers of icing and four layers of cake. All the cakes will be covered with vanilla buttercream and the chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream. What did we taste?

• Chocolate chip cake, cannoli cream filling
• Almond cake with custard, two layers of chocolate mousse
• Lemon cake with raspberry fruit filling and two layers of raspberry mousse
• White cake with coconut frosting filling
• Chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream and coconut pecan (German chocolate) filling
• Rum cake with cream cheese frosting

Holy Moly - I didn’t even attempt to count those calories.

We ended up with:

• One 8 inch cake (bottom of two tier cake), 25 servings of chocolate chip cake, with cannoli cream filling
• Two 6 inch cakes, 28 servings of almond cake with custard, two layers of chocolate mousse
• One 6 inch (top of two tier cake) and one 10 inch cake, 53 servings of lemon cake with raspberry fruit filling and two layers of raspberry mousse
• One 8 inch cake, 25 servings, chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream and chocolate mousse filling

What will all these cakes look like?

Like this:

… but with real cakes.

When we first decided on a cake buffet, I figured that my friends, family and I would be responsible for transporting and setting up the cakes. By scaling things back a bit and sticking with a bakery, we’re now able to have the bakery drop them off and set them up just as they would a real wedding cake - which is one less thing for us to worry about!

Was your cake search easy? Or, did you taste your way through every bakery in town?