Tasting Cake and Loving It

After tasting and deciding on our entrees, we were at the part I was most looking forward to... cake!

The Patrick Haley Mansion had this lovely cake set out to show us a sample of their work...


We were served 2 of each of the following...

Red Velvet cake with cream cheese frosting

Yellow cake with strawberry filling and buttercream frosting

Marble cake with chocolate filling and buttercream frosting

Everyone passed me the marble cake first, because they know how much I love chocolate. I've been dreaming of a chocolate wedding cake since day one.

So I tasted it.

It was thick and chocolately (but not too much). The frosting was delicious. Overall, it was very good cake.


Next, I tried the red velvet cake. I had never had red velvet before, and I always thought it looked really gross, but I was surprised at how tasty it was. It wasn't my top pick, but I finished off the piece anyway (because it's sinful to waste perfectly good cake!).

After that, they passed me the strawberry cake. I took a bite, and it was to die for. Absolute perfection. I ate the whole piece... followed by most of Ryan's piece.

Gimme your cake!

De-licious!

Everyone was making fun of how much cake I had eaten. I went into a total sugar high (but crashed in the car on the way home).


After the cake, there was still more!

They had a chocolate fountain set up which a bunch of dipping items. Even though we already knew we wouldn't be having a chocolate fountain at our wedding, we tasted it anyway (you know... just so I could write this lovely review).


We came to the general consensus that the dipping items were good, but the chocolate was a little too sweet for our tastes. It may have been milk chocolate, and I'm more of a semi-sweet kinda gal.

After that, we tasted the sweets table. I had a chocolate tuxedo strawberry, which was very good. Sorry I don't have a photo... I ate it too fast. But it looked something like this...

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After all the cake drama, we decided to just let our reception venue make our cake. It was delicious, and the best price around ($3 per person for buttercream, $4 for fondant). You can't beat that!

So we'll be going with the yellow cake with strawberry filling.


Mmm... just looking at the photo makes me drool!

Hopefully we'll have some leftovers on our wedding day... because I'm the bride, and I can eat 4 pieces of cake if I want to!

For the Love of Cake

I mentioned on Tuesday the confusion with a bakery I had contacted.

I think I'm going to just let the situation simmer for a bit.

For all we know, we might taste our reception venue's cake tomorrow and think it's fantastic. After all, we do have a reputation of picking our first option.

In the meantime, I will post some photos of cakes I like. Ryan and I are into pretty simple cakes, and we like buttercream frosting (cheaper and tastier!), so this shouldn't be too hard...

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All this cake is making me hungry! I especially like the 2nd one and the last one.

We're hanging out in Illinois for our Wedding Overload Weekend, so I'll have tons of stuff to share when I return on Monday!

Cake Confusion

Welcome to my newest follower, Carli!

Our reception venue makes wedding cakes starting at $3 per serving. While we haven't yet tried their cake (we'll hopefully do that at our tasting on Sunday during our WOW), we like to keep our options open... just in case it sucks.

So I found a few bakeries in the area that seemed within our price range. I emailed them, but only got one real response back.

"What is the date of your wedding and how many guests do you need to feed? Are you looking for a stacked 3 or 4 tier cake or something smaller? Pricing varies according to how large of a cake you need as well as how much artwork you would like on your cake. A rough estimate is $2.50-6.50 per slice for budget purposes."

Okay, so that sounds reasonable. I emailed them back with: June 25th, 200 guests, 3-tiered would be fine, supplemented with some sheet cake, not a lot of artwork.

Something like this...

OMG, isn't this cake gorgeous?

This was the response I received:

"You have time to plan. The best thing to do at this time is to look for pictures of wedding cakes that you like on the internet and send it to us. The pricing is not final unless it is 3 months from your wedding date. "

Hmm...

I was a little confused by their email, but Ryan and I are thinking what they mean is that we won't know the actual cost until 3 months before the wedding.

That just won't work for us.

What if, come next March, they inform us it's going to cost $1,200... when we could have had our reception venue make our cake and only paid $650?

The cake just isn't that big of a deal to us. Yes, we want it to taste good. Yes, we want it to look good. But we're not going to break our budget over this (or cause unwanted stress).

Another Wedding

Welcome to my very first follower, Miss June Bride. Yay for june brides!

As I mentioned last week, Ryan and I spent the weekend in New York for his cousin's wedding.

It's amazing how different a wedding is when you're planning your own. Ryan and I were very aware of all the little details and the layout of the day. I'll admit that we were talking about our wedding a lot on their wedding day. Woops!

Everyone loves photos, so here are some detail shots from their big day.

The church where the ceremony was held had beautiful stained glass windows...


Ryan was a reader during the ceremony. His cousin asked him to read first Corinthians, which is the same reading his mother read during her mother's ceremony.


The flower girl was Ryan's niece. She wore an adorable white layered dress with a teal sash...


Instead of throwing flower petals, she threw fall leaves...


The ceremony was very touching, and lasted about 40 minutes.


The wedding party took photos at the church immediately following the ceremony and receiving line. The groom and groomsmen wore brown striped tuxes with teal bow ties. The ladies wore teal strapless dresses and carried fall-colored bouquets...


At the reception, the tables were decorated with 2 vases with submerged flowers and floating candles, along with a tall vase with red cherry blossoms...


We had assigned tables, but no assigned seats.


Each table had a bottle of red wine and a bottle of white wine (but the bar remained open during the entire reception and dinner). There was a menu on each table, and the guests were asked to choose their entree the day-of.


I ordered chicken stuffed with wild rice and spinach. Ryan ordered some sort of fish stuffed with crab...


The cake was made by a high school friend of the bride and groom. It was vanilla cake with Kahlua frosting inside (and possibly something else? But I'm no cake expert). It had brown ribbons around each tier, and fondant roses on the top, along with little sugary beads spread throughout...


Overall, the wedding was beautiful and fun. I turned to Ryan at the end and said, "can you believe the next wedding we attend will be our own?"


Crazy. Only 8 1/2 months to go!

The Distance Catches Up With Us

Being a long-distance bride is tough.

Granted, it could be worse. Ryan and I are only 3 hours away from our wedding locale.

But we are busy people. We sat down last weekend and looked at our calendars. We only have 4 free weekends the rest of the year. Oh... my... goodness.

Due to the constraints on our availability, we are planning one super grand extra productive mega wedding-overload-weekend... also known as the WOW.

The WOW will be in mid-October and will include:

• Food tasting
• Cake tasting
• Ceremony music consultation
• Registering at Crate and Barrel
  
• Looking at rehearsal dinner venues
  

That's a lot of stuff to cram into 36 hours.

One exciting part of this weekend is that Ryan's mom will be joining us. We invited her along, assuming she would probably say no because it's so far away, but she said yes.

It's good because it will give her a chance to be involved in the wedding planning a little bit more (it's hard because she lives on the east coast and the wedding is in Chicago). She will get to see our reception venue for the first time, and check out my hometown.

My parents on the left. Ryan's parents on the right.

To say my mom is excited would be a gross understatement. She practically squealed on the phone when I told her the news. How adorable.