Weddingbee Blog

As I mentioned in my last post, I left the cake in the capable hands of our coordinator. We don’t love cake, and it was last on my priority list of details. But… the cake was, obviously, too big a detail to be laissez faire about. I don’t know what I was thinking.

Anyway, in the weeks before the wedding, we were focused on macarons, and escort cards, all the final little touches. And the weekend came, and the rehearsal, ceremony, cocktail hour were all wonderful, and we were on a just-married high!

We walk in, get introduced as Mr. and Mrs., do our little first dance (more on that later - it was hilarious). We sit down, enjoy, smiling, taking in the scene of everyone around us… then I look over my shoulder… [all images are by guests of the wedding unless noted]

Do you see it?

Me: Is that our cake?

Mr. P : It’s kind of small…

Me: Hmm, that’s not the right color. Huh.

At that point I sort of shrugged it off, just giddy from all the excitement, and it didn’t look that bad from far away. Not at all upset. Later on in the evening, I even passed by it, and thought, ‘That doesn’t look right. Maybe it’ll look better on camera. Oh well.’

I even thought, ‘I should put the hydrangeas [which were placed around the table] on top of the cake.’ But then I forgot about it, and instead had a lot of fun eating and mingling with guests.

Even when it was time to stand in front of it, Mr. P and I giggled. Whoa, that’s an uuuuugly cake! We were just so happy in the moment. Various friends and family members made speeches as we stood there smiling, with ugly cake glowing in all its Play-Doh-like glory.

Then it was time to cut the cake. We could now see everything up close in HD. We stared at it, muttering under our breaths, “Wowwww. Really? What happened? Did it melt?”

I don’t think it melted. I think this is the way it was intended to look. The primitive piping, the haphazard, unfinished, unrefined, roughness of it, made me laugh a little. Just a little. It looked like Play-Doh… more like Play-don’t… like claymation. It was sort of lumpy, and just… just, just judge for yourselves:

Does our cake wreck look anything like the inspiration below? Play-Doh clown cake, I tell you!

Source

C’mon, could the baker at least try to blend the broken, uneven trim together just a little bit better? How about–here’s a thought–uniform beads? Look, I’m no baker, and I’m sure decorating with fondant and lacy icing is not easy. But, really? I was better off with no decoration and just fresh flowers. I honestly believe that simple is the way to go. Yeah, simple and buttercream. Fondant=chewing gum.

Anyway, then we tried cutting into it. The fondant had a rubbery texture as we sliced through it. It was difficult to get a slice out; we had to tear a piece off, and the icing wouldn’t really budge. Then we had a little piece…

It was dry, overly sweet, the icing chewy. Now, to be fair, we only had a little tiny bite. The moment I tasted it, I regretted asking for a switch in the cake flavor. Originally we were to have a lemon cake with raspberry filling. I changed it to almond cake with apricot filling. Grrr. Look at our faces! It’s sort of funny! Sort of.

However, we quickly forgot about it, as we had the rest of the night to dance and have fun!!!! I, myself, completely forgot about the cake for weeks.

Why am I even bothering with talking about it now? Well, last week, I suddenly remembered the cake. Sentimental post-bride-brain kicked in. Logic would tell you that you should forget about the cake wreck. But I was just a little curious as to what happened to the top tier.

So, I emailed the coordinator. At that point, it had been a month and a half since the wedding. She responds after a long period of silence, with this email:

Perfume,

Sorry this has taken so long, but I have been out of the office at a conference and then on vacation. I thought that we had moved your cake top to one of our freezers, but I have scoured them all and have not found it. I spoke with our Pastry Chef and he said that when you come for your anniversary he will bake a cake for you.

I hope you had a wonderful honeymoon. Thanks for the beautiful scarf - I will think of you both every time I wear it.

All the best,

Esmé

I’d like to preface by saying that Esme did a WONDERFUL job as our coordinator. She was extremely professional, hard working, detail-oriented, etc. Neither she nor the Homestead has any affiliation with this baker. She just helped us out by finding someone who said s/he could do it. (As the email indicated, we like Esme so much, we got her a little gift from our travels as a thank you.)

However, I didn’t like her response. While it was very nice to offer the resort’s baker to bake us a random cake on our anniversary, it wouldn’t be the cake we had on our wedding day - however hideous, disgusting and ridiculous it was. It may have been a wreck, but it was OUR cake wreck! More to come (we haven’t yet resolved the issue)…

How would you feel if a) you got an ugly cake and b) the one-year-anniversary-top-tier got lost—would you just forget about it?