Weddingbee Blog

(If you’re in the DC area and you haven’t been to the bakery that this post is named after, go immediately! I recommend Niel’s Hat Trick, but you really can’t go wrong. My mouth is watering just thinking about it… YUM!)

Back in April when I mentioned that we were going to have to find a new bakery since my baker friend had a bun in the oven? No? Well, now you know. I immediately went about emailing a bunch of bakeries in the area to get a feel for pricing, flavors and if they even had the availability to take on another wedding for early September. After some shocking prices, sadness that my favorite bakery no longer does wedding cakes and a surprising number of bakeries just never getting back to me, we set up tastings with three: Amy Beck Cake Designs, Luscious Layers Bakery and one other that I’m not naming because it wasn’t awesome, let’s just call it #3.

In true Miss Bacon fashion, the appointments are all within a week of each other so that we can make easy comparisons without too many notes. The first tasting was at Amy Beck and it was ahhhhhhhhmazing. She didn’t ask us what flavors we liked or what we wanted to try, so when we got there, we were greeted by a table filled with all the favors of cake and frosting that she offered. Talk about a great first impression!

The first thing we did was talk through the look and feel of our wedding; I shared our inspiration board, pictures of our invitations, the flowers, my dress, the girls’ dresses, the guys’ tuxes and our little cake topper. This blogging thing has made me VERY well prepared for these kinds of meetings. Then we talked through our preferences with cakes - did we like round or square cakes; tall and skinny tiers or short and stout tiers; did we want them traditionally stacked or wonky and playfully stacked? Lastly, we talked through our vision of what the design would be and she left us to the multitude of flavors to taste away while she worked up a sketch.

Nom Nom Nom Nom Nom SUGAR HIGH!!

Menu of flavors, and we tried every one!

One word: OMGtheflavorsaresoamazinghowdidwelivethislongwithouteverexperiencingthesecakes?!?! We mixed and matched just about every flavor from pistachio cake with hazelnut buttercream to devil’s food with raspberry buttercream and chocolate truffle ganache. Everything was amazing, even the plain ol’ chocolate and vanilla cakes with coordinating buttercreams. This lady knows what she’s doing. After being sufficiently sugared, she came back over with a great sketch that was pretty much everything we asked for and promised that we’d be getting a full quote in the next couple day and after that, we would start talking grooms cake. We left giddy with sugar and so pleased that our first official tasting went so well.

Our last two tastings were scheduled for the next weekend, and FMIL and FSFIL (Future Stepfather in Law) Bacon were going to be in town, so I did my due diligence and confirmed with the bakeries that we were cool to bring them along. Both bakeries were ok with it and we were off to the tastings!

The first stop was Luscious Layers Bakery and we sat down at a beautiful table with the owner to look through pictures and talk through our wedding and our cake design preferences. Once we had gotten through the nitty gritty details, Ashley set off to work on a sketch and some rough pricing and out came the CAKE! Unlike Amy Beck, Luscious Layers asks for you to go to their website and pick out the 4-5 flavor combinations that are most enticing to you and bake mini cakes for you to try. So we were each presented a plate with 5 slices of cake that we had and picked ourselves: Red Velvet with Cream Cheese Frosting, Coconut Cake with Coconut Cream, Champagne Cake with Strawberries and Whipped cream, Pistachio with Cannoli Cream and Butter Cake with Praline Cream.

We each got one of these! Bad Miss Bacon, I took bites before I took pictures…

So yummy that I wanted some of his. He clearly didn’t notice and that’s why he’s a keeper!

The cakes were all really good, but I couldn’t get the Almond cake from Amy Beck out of my mind, so I asked if they had any on hand that we could taste to get a feel for it. She went right to the bakery case and crabbed a cupcake for us all to try. Um, it was pine! We talked a bit more about some of the other things we want to have at the wedding like the sweet table, and skirted around the grooms cake since the groom was beside me, then happily went on our way.

After a quick pit stop at 7-11 for some salty chips to break up alllllll the sugar we were having, we were on to #3. We ended up being about 15 minutes early to the appointment, but they happily took us in and sat us at the table… then scrounged for two more chairs since there were four of us (like I emailed them about before). One of the ladies on staff came over and chatted with us briefly about what we were looking for, since we’d had this conversation a couple of times, we knew exactly what we wanted, then she took my inspiration board and photos and brought us cake! This bakery hadn’t asked us for flavors so we expected something like what Amy Beck did for us - lots of flavors to taste and maybe mix and match. Oh no. This bakery brought us one plate of thinly sliced cakes in whatever flavors they had on hand: Lemon with Lemon frosting , Vanilla with Orange frosting , Chocolate with Vanilla frosting, Red velvet with Cream Cheese frosting , Chocolate with Raspberry frosting and Lemon with Vanilla frosting and Raspberry jam. This would be a good time to note that I don’t like lemon baked goods of any variety and I’m not a big fan of orange baked goods either.

You want all four of us to share this? Really?

We each took a tiny bit of the different flavors and stared at each other as the woman came back over and asked the Baconator to take a walk so that we could discuss his groom’s cake before she could give us a quote. Really, lady, you just asked the groom to leave?? He obliged and she proceeded to chastise me for not bringing pictures of what I wanted his cake to look like. I just started sputtering random scenes from Star Wars to get her on her way. She then asked for our budget for both cakes, I told her and she guffawed at me. “Well, with that budget we might be able to give you a discount since you’re getting two cakes. We’ll still have to max it out and that won’t include tax or delivery. Oh, and this quote is only good for 3 days. Have you picked flavors that you’d like?” Thankfully, the Baconator quickly returned and we could get the heck out of that shop. We’d had enough of them and their lemon cakes (not to mention the woman yacking away on the phone and the other lady berating her employee right in front of us).

Did you have wildly different experiences with some vendors? How did you handle it?