Let them eat cake!!!

I've been really looking forward to using that subject line. :-)

For the past few weeks, K & I have been trying to nail down the bakery for our cake. We'd started looking at cakes about a month ago & K called around to a couple places to set up tastings. It was an eye-opening experience. Some of the places he talked to charged an insane amount of money for the tasting - between $50 and $75. Of course, if you ordered the cake from them, the fee went against the cost of the cake.  But, if you didn't, it was some really expensive cake.

K also mentioned bringing the kids along to a couple of them & they weren't really sure how to handle it. Some of them said things like, "Well, we can only fit 3 or 4 people in our tasting room." So, they're charging you $50 and they can't fit more than 4 people in the room? You've got to be kidding me.

Of all of the possible wedding tasks, this is the most kid-friendly. How could we not include them? Neither one of us wanted to work with a vendor that wasn't flexible enough to work with kids.

So, we kept looking...

A few weeks ago, we decided on Saturday morning that we'd see what places were available to have tastings that afternoon.  We found one in Tacoma, Celebrity Cakes. They were flexible enough to work us in, which was really nice.

When we got there, the baker took us over to the "Wedding Room" which had some small 2 - 3 person tables in the middle and a lot of cakes around the room. It was great to see so many of their cakes in person. The baker also had a tray of cake that looked like this:

***screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeech*** (insert the sound of a record scratching here)

So, I had some great pictures of the cakes & the plate after we ate them. I could tell you the flavors & what we liked about them.

But, Tuesday, as I went to download them to put them in this space - I accidentally deleted all of them.  Ugh. I was so depressed that I didn't post; I couldn't face the poor, pictureless, boring page.

I've finally moved past it, but this post is going to be less exciting than I wanted it to be.  I'm sorry. :-(

I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming...

***screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeech*** 


The plate was a square gold plate with about 8 different slices of cake on it. The cake slices were about the size you'd see at a wedding - two layers of cake with a frosting in between & buttercream frosting. Our favorite cake was the red velvet & there was a white cake with a really good eclair filling. The carrot cake was pretty good too. Overall, we liked the cake but weren't completely blown away by anything. So, we left without signing up for anything.

One other thing K realized later was that all of the cakes in the room were decorated with fondant, but we didn't get to taste any of the fondant. It doesn't surprise me, because fondant doesn't generally taste that good. It seems like they should include it in the tasting, though, if that's what they predominately use to decorate.their cakes. Do you agree?

Last weekend, K and I took the kids to Sugar Rush Baking Company. We'd seen them at the Tacoma Bridal show we went to last month & really liked the personality of the people in the booth and their taster cakes. Plus, they work with Herban Feast (our caterer) a lot.

Sugar Rush is in a coffee shop, Coffee to a Tea, in West Seattle where they serve cupcakes & mini-cupcakes. We had a lot of fun at the tasting. We sat down & talked to the coordinator, Jillian, some about our colors & our ideas for the cake. Then, we showed her our Save the Date to give her a better idea of what we were looking for. Once we were on the same page, she took us to the display case and we got to pick out what we wanted to try.

(In this case, you should picture a pretty glass pedestal with a bunch of beautiful mini & big cupcakes on it)

I loved everything and I think K & the kids did too. The cake tasted really good, and the frostings were really flavorful and tasty. Some of our favorites were the red velvet, the coconut and chocolate. The white cake was really good too, as was the vanilla.  The frostings were all delicious; they had a great chocolate ganache and the mint buttercream was good too - which are more unique.

After all of the tastings, K, the kids & I unanimously agreed that we should go with Sugar Rush.  So, we talked some prices. They were reasonable so we signed the contract & put down our save the date deposit.  I am SO totally & completely excited. Not only is it one more thing off the list, but I really feel like this was a great choice for us.

One thing we talked about before we left was what we wanted the cake to look at. We decided to have a square cake and we're going to alternate the design on the layers between a piped decoration that looks like the branches of our tree and dots with a ribbon around the bottom.

As far as the size of the cake, there are two different ways we could go.  One is a six-layer cake that is insanely tall and (not surprisingly) more expensive.  It's pretty cool, though; it reaches over the head of the lady who sets it up. Sweet!  The other (more practical and cheaper) way to go is to get a four-layer cake and then (depending on the number of guests) possibly get a sheet cake as well. This is definitely less cool, but more affordable & it will still be a really good, beautiful cake.

What do you think?  Four layers or six?