Weddingbee Blog

Hi, I haven’t blogged here in 800,000 years because wedding planning (invitation design, specifically) and life in general has driven me against the wall in the blogging department. I eat, sleep, work, and wedding plan, but now that my invitations are at the printer, I get to blog again. So, howdy. Again.

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My wedding budget strategy has been to think of how much I think something should cost, double it, and hope I get a nice surprise when I request a quote from a potential wedding vendor. This has worked well for me, and so far, I get to feel like I’m saving tons of money on our wedding when my quotes are constantly coming back under budget. I loop Bossyboots into our updated wedding costs, and he thinks I’m a genius for saving us all this money.

Cue angels singing.

Recently, I said to myself “Self, you should book yourself a wedding cake. Your wedding is happening in two months, and people will expect cake. I know cake isn’t really your thing, but you are having a wedding, so just get a cake.”

Self is quite wise.

As many bees have revealed…I am not a big cake person. White cake is totally boring to me, most other cakes are a lot of meh, I enjoy carrot cake and yellow cake with chocolate icing. The only cake I REALLY love is German Chocolate cake. Not just any German Chocolate cake: Betty Crocker Super Moist.

$1.98, ladies.

(Source)

Don’t judge - $1.98 means more moolah for the fun stuff. My Rue La La addiction won’t enable itself.

Wedding cake is Bossyboots’ thing. He loves cake—I really don’t care. Desserts in general aren’t for me, usually. For our required wedding cake, my only stipulation is that there be no fondant and I want German choco cake happening. For everything else, Bossyboots had carte blanche to go nuts!

We did our bakery research and found our most likely wedding cake vendor. We traipsed right on into our tasting, ready to pick a cake and be done with it. Cost wasn’t even a blip on my radar, because I KNEW I had budgeted a crazy amount of money for our cake. No way would we go over on the quote.

You are smart people; you know where this is going.

So, we sit down and dive right on into the eating. She happened to have some German choco filling that she added to our tasting plate (I had to have my German choco cake!). See below for our array of selections:

After ten minutes of hemming and hawing (all the flavors were fantastic), we ultimately decided on a three-tier cake:

• Top Tier: chocolate cake with a cappuccino filling
• Middle Tier: chocolate cake with a German chocolate coconut filling
• Bottom Tier: white cake with a fresh strawberry + white chocolate mousse filling (we combined two of the fillings because they really were begging to be friends.)

For decorations, again this was really hard because I just am not a cake person. As long as it doesn’t look like something off a 1980s version of The Sopranos, I’m fine. Bossyboots had more opinions about it, and ultimately he settled on this lil’ number, but in pink:

Perfect! Just fine, this all sounds great. So… what’s the damage?

A million freaking dollars. …

OK not really, but it might as well have been. I’m someone who always assumes the high end on financial quotes, I’ve been around the wedding industry for several years, this is my second time to plan a wedding, and I just about fell out of my chair, got back in my chair, and then fell out again.

Not known for my diplomacy, my response was… “That is a TON of money for an 80-100 person wedding cake. And I don’t even like cake.”

We thanked her for her time and had a Snappy/Bossyboots family convo in the car.

• ME: “Bossyboots, I do not want that cake. Can we just have pie instead?”
• BOSSYBOOTS: “Sure, but that’s weird, and I love wedding cake. Also, I am sick of vendor meetings and just want to get to the party part already. That’s worth a billion dollars to me.” (Bossyboots is quite traditional, as well as a cake lover. He also loves to save money, so the fact that he was ready to book this cake and get to the party meant that he was REALLY sick of vendor meetings. We all know pies at a wedding are not weird, but he’s a man, and most men don’t know about pies at weddings.)
• ME: “If I agree to this million dollar cake, can you agree to truffle popcorn snacks at our wedding?” (A previous point of contention - he was insisting on sliders+quesadillas; I wanted sliders+popcorn. If you disagree with me, don’t tell Bossyboots. I need to be right on this one.)
• BOSSYBOOTS: “Done.”

Now let me say, I feel that her price was fair. Fair because she is an experienced baker with a long career. She knows what she’s doing, and I know I can count on her to do a great job and be a true pro. If she were younger… I would feel differently. I was just shocked by the bottom line, and my gut says it’s just a lot of money for dessert.

I am sure you can guess how this ended. We are having a million dollar cake at our wedding. It will be delicious and beautiful, and you Snapdragon wedding guests had better lick your plates clean and go back for seconds! Also, tell Bossyboots that whoever insisted on truffle popcorn at the wedding is a GENIUS.

Did the price of your wedding cake bowl you over? Also, what flavors are you using, so that I can have cake flavor choice regret?