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By the time we got home from our third and final planning trip, we had decided that if the official quotes were vastly different then we would go with the least expensive, and if the costs came in close together we might cry. To preface this let me say that both Olive Catering and Scrape the Plate put together awesome menus, and we would be elated to include either Olive or Scrape the Plate as a vendor…
We received both quotes within days of each other, and they both included creative twists to delicious food. Both caterers use food that is in season and as local as possible (fresh and tasty, mmm)…
Drum roll, please… When we looked at the final numbers there was a clear winner. Scrape the Plate Catering! They came in significantly lower for family-style service. We are pleased to announce that Scott Hale with Scrape the Plate is our caterer. Ironically he is the only gay vendor that we found to use on our actual wedding day (which is neither here nor there, and we LOVE every single vendor we have chosen to work with). Scrape the Plate has catered for American Idol and local Human Rights Campaign events; we feel absolutely amazed that we get to work with Scrape the Plate!!!
Would you like to know what we will be munching on?
Deciding to have a cookie bar at the wedding was a no-brainer for us. Mr. Woodpecker loves cookies, and my family loves to bake! My mom was always baking throughout my childhood, so I knew having her and my other family members contribute to a cookie-bar favor would be perfect for us.
A few weeks ago, I got the wooden tongs for our cookie bar in the mail. As I ripped them open and jumped up and down to show Mr. Woodpecker, he gave me the “crazy” look. “You’re really excited about this cookie thing, aren’t you?” he asked.
Of course, I’m excited…they’re cookies! I am also excited, however, to finally have a project done. I finally gathered all of the supplies for our cookie bar and decided to create a mock-up so that I could put this project to rest until right before the wedding, when I would put everything together and make all of the labels.
It, of course, did not come our exactly as planned, but I am happy with my final results:
Personal image
I had initially purchased paper to do a wrap-around label on the bottom of the inside of the jar. After scouring several craft stores, however, I could not find any patterned paper to match our colors, so I decided to try ribbon. I think I like this idea better—it’s simpler. And I like simplicity. I am going for a similar look to this for our cookie bar:
With the first caterer out of the picture, we went back to the drawing board and located three caterers that were highly recommended and seemed to have food styles in line with ours. On a quick trip to Kansas City we lined up meetings with each of them.
First up was Olive Events Catering. Their kitchen is out in the country facing a private pond, and it feels really welcoming. We met with Marisa and Nicole. Marisa is the owner and Nicole is the event coordinator.
Let me tell you, these two ladies were FANTASTIC. We were welcomed with a fully dressed table and flights of tasty bites prepared right in front of us. After we had tasted the nummy nummy bites, Marisa and Nicole sat down with us to brainstorm. Seriously to brainstorm—there was no printed menu to select from, but there was pen and paper. Marisa and Nicole are both very creative and came up with some fantastic ideas that definitely matched our style and the palates of our guests.
Here are some picks of the tasty bites. (We got kind of distracted after that.)
Personal image / Food by Olive Events Catering
Let’s talk a bit about catering…
We were ecstatic that we had found a caterer the first time out. My FMIL and FFIL had recently attended a wedding that they had catered, and they had rave reviews for them. The sales manager was gay, they had catered for other same-sex couples, and when we met the owners they were really nice so we felt really comfortable with them. But there was a catch: we could not taste their food before signing a contract and laying down $2,500. That made me kind of nervous, but as I said they had great reviews, FMIL and FFIL were still raving about the food, and they seemed to have their stuff together.
So in September we asked them to put together a contract. We decided that we were OK laying down a hefty deposit before tasting the goods. So we waited…
October passed and we hadn’t heard anything. I sent an email just to check in; we were way ahead of the game and totally understood they might have more pressing events. The response we got back confirmed that they were “super busy” and were working on our contract—OK, no problem.
November passed and we hadn’t heard anything, so again I sent an email to check in. This time we didn’t receive a response—kind of concerning, but it was the holiday season.
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We are having a seated dinner for our guests, so we had to come up with a way to designate a way for the servers to know who was eating steak and who was eating fish. I didn’t really like the formality of place settings that much, since we were going for a laid-back feel at the beach, but I figured it was the best way to identify people to the waitstaff.
After tracking down the people that didn’t send their response cards back (that’s a brand new stamp on that response card, y’all!) to find out what they wanted to eat, I was able to do a little research on some cute place settings.
I knew I had seen a really cute picture where the bride had used these mini wooden clothespins to hold the place setting onto the napkin. Somehow I didn’t save said picture in any of my many inspiration folders that I have. Fail.
It looked something like this…
The Wednesday before the wedding, MOB, my sister, and I executed a last-minute favor project.
Long before the days of Pinterest, I ran across an idea for a fortune cookie wedding favor. I liked the symbolism of receiving a fortune at the start of a new year. I saved the idea in one of my umpteen wedding spreadsheets and moved on. Fast forward to when I actually needed to reference it and it was nowhere to be found. I tried to search for it again but never quite found the right post. Oh well—time to wing it!
MOB called her local Chinese restaurant and I stopped in to pick up a box of 200 fortune cookies for $16. I bought some Baker’s chocolate from the grocery store and treat bags from Jo-Ann and we were ready to roll.
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
Scientists and economists have long talked about the problem of too many choices: give a person an overload of options and you wind up overloading the person and paralyzing his or her decision making process. This problem becomes apparent in wedding planning, especially when considering the myriad possibilities for a venue. Will you have your reception in a converted loft or a city park, an outdoor conservatory or an art museum, a hotel ballroom or a country club, a banquet hall or a restaurant?
We decided to have our Vegas reception, as well as our hometown party, in a restaurant. It ended up being one of the best decisions that we made — and it might be a perfect option for you as well. I highly recommend it, and here are some reasons why.
In case you missed it, my current topic of interest is the wonderful world of sweets at weddings, and what the Dalmatians can offer that will be fun, unique, and tasty (while still meeting that pesky criterion of not breaking the bank). While I had begrudgingly let the frozen yogurt bar idea go, I was still hanging on to a desire to incorporate something ice cream related. Then, as luck (or endless internet searching) would have it, I came across something that not only met but exceeded all of my sweet dreams!
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| Sugar Wagon / Image via NashFoodTrucks.com |
That’s right, an ice cream sandwich cart! As I read through their mouth-watering menu and scrolled through their adorable pictures, I was ready to enthusiastically jump aboard the Sugar Wagon!
Oh my goodness. Hive, I am no stranger to chocolate. There are so many delicious forms and shapes it comes in. One of my favorites is the chocolate truffle. I had always assumed that there was some secret magic Voodoo behind these bite-sized delights. I got a wild hair and decided I needed to attempt to make some and was THRILLED to find out how easy they are!
While we are not including them in our wedding menu, I think they are perfect for any elegant affair (or casual affair, or lunch in the office, for that matter). You can bet, at some point I will be a hero when I show up with a box of these to a party!
Now, because sharing is caring, and I care about the hive a whole lot, I am going to share my process for making these bad boys.
Read more…
I know this will sound crazy, but planning our rehearsal dinner has been the absolute worst part of wedding planning. Our invitations were ridonk work-intensive, but my annoyance level has never been higher than when rifling through a million rehearsal dinner options. I felt like Goldilocks… everything was too far, too expensive, too high-class, too low-brow, too this, too that.
(Source)
Our parameters for a rehearsal dinner spot had seemed to be simple…
Shouldn’t be too tough, right? Wrong.
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While on our Weddingpalooza of meetings in Dallas, Bossyboots’ and my primary objective was to line out our wedding menu. We were excited, because you know what a venue tasting means…food, food, and more food! We are nothing if not eaters.
Um yeah, and that was just about 25% of the food we consumed at our tasting. The chicken was delicious, and I hate chicken! I’d say we loved 90% of the food we tried—narrowing everything down was really tough. There was bargaining, negotiating, Bossyboots and I nearly came to blows (not really, I am just exaggerating for dramatic effect), but we made it through with a minimum of wheedling, threats, and groveling.
In making our decisions, we had to consider our audience.
Bossyboots and I have been planning our wedding from afar: 965 miles worth of afar, if you want to be exact about it. Things have been fairly easy up to this point, mainly because we have been booking people that we totally trust, with longstanding professional reputations. We haven’t been bitten in the booty yet with this methodology, and hopefully our not-horribly-stressful wedding planning life will continue. We’re busy, but just because weddings are a lot of work, not because we’ve had any unprofessional vendors. We’ve really been incredibly happy so far with everyone we’ve booked.
*I realize I’ve now jinxed myself, but we’ll just move on.*
Anyway, there are just a few things that we can’t do for our Dallas wedding from Chicago, mainly food-based. We also had never met our florist or DJ. And we can’t choose our wedding menu without tasting all of the available options first. I mean, come on. I never miss a chance to stuff my face.
So, we scheduled a wedding trip, with 12,000 vendor meetings, all for the purpose of nailing this wedding down. And so I could stuff my face.
Read more…
…even worse than the one I used to know. It’s been said, extremely misogynistically, that once you put a wedding ring on a woman, she blows up like a balloon. This statement makes me extremely angry. First of all, maybe women tend to get fat post-wedding because they’re having kids or their metabolisms are slowing down. Maybe it’s because women tend to have a higher percentage of body fat than men. Regardless, it’s really not anyone’s business, and it’s horrifying that not only do women have to struggle to look perfect on their wedding day, but now we also have to worry about gaining the newlywed nine and becoming a statistic.
That being said…I am really looking forward to being able to eat whatever I want after the wedding. OK, I’ll be real: my diet since the proposal hasn’t changed that much, but I am definitely depriving myself of some of my old favorite artery-cloggers, and my patience is wearing thin (unlike my waistband—not fair). Before the ring (B.R. from now on), I ate Frosted Mini Wheats with skim milk for breakfast; now I eat a banana. B.R. I ate a salad, two servings of fruit, and a bag of Triscuits with a Diet Pepsi for lunch. Now I’ve replaced the Triscuits with another serving of fruit (who knew those little buggers had so many calories???), and I’ve done away with the pop. B.R. dinner was a free-for-all, and weekends? I’m too ashamed to mention them. Now I try to eat a Lean Cuisine for dins. Weekends are still too shameful for me to write about. I may or may not be eating chocolate chips from the bag as I type…
Image via Kells Craft / Edited by me
I am not a cake person. For some reason it’s just never been my thing. Even as a child I would pass on the birthday cake. Now show me some warm chocolate chip or peanut butter cookies, and we have a different story; however, in the past year or so I discovered something very curious: my distaste for cake comes to a screeching halt when cake becomes CUPcakes. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that cupcakes come in so many flavors: key lime, apple pie, salted caramel, carrot cake, red velvet, s’mores, banana split, peach cobbler. (I could fill a whole post, but for y’alls’ sakes, I’ll keep myself in check.)
Trying new flavors and cupcake shops has almost become a sport for Mr. Hawk and me. If we find a new shop in town, we pick out a half dozen to take home and feast on them rest of the week. (Correction: mine last a week. Mr. Hawk eats all of his within two days and then pouts until I share my half with him.) We even have our favorites cupcakes and shops ranked. (Moistness of cake, cake-to-icing ratio, and cupcake size are all considered.) It.Is.Serious.
Pearl’s Deep Dish Apple Pie—my absolute favorite! / Image via Foodspotting
So naturally, since cupcakes are somewhat of a large presence in our lives, they must be a part of the wedding-dessert menu. It makes me a little sad to be missing out on some gorgeous wedding cakes, but it just wouldn’t be the Hawk wedding without cupcakes.
As I stated in my last post, last weekend was a whirlwind of wedding git-’r-done-ness. Me managed to nail down our menu, get pictures of the venue and select/taste cake and get on the bakery’s calendar. It was a little like we were just going from one meal to the other but it was totally worth it!
We started off by heading to Arcadia. There we ordered close to every (OK only about half) appetizer they offered. After much dipping, tasting and discussing we decided on these three for cocktail hour:
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