cake stands

i dragged andrew to snohomish last weekend in the wicked heat to check out their antique stores for random bits of furniture. i walked away at the end of the day with a sweet vintage hat and a rekindled desire to use a milk glass cake stand at my wedding. most varieties are white, but it might be neat to nurture my passion for complimentary colors by featuring an orange mango cake on a 9" blue stand. a white one can certainly double as very classic, functional, collectible....and while the white is very understatedly simple, i am in love their undersides. here's a smattering from a few i'm following on ebay.

let them eat (good) cake

so even for the plainest of the plain cakes I had wanted - with impeccable fondant and without the painstakingly handmade edible flower....it would run me $7+ per slice, and we all know that fondant tastes terrible. after i got over the diy idea, i entertained the idea of having a fake tiered cake, and then serving sheet cake, at less than $2 per slice...and much tastier. ever-an-anti-buttercream-person, i found i could get a whip cream filled cake (although custard was also an option, but i don't know if i'm game for that). but then when i thought about it, for an extra $1 a slice i could get the most amazing mango cake, made with those phillipine atafulo mangoes (which should be considered an entirely different fruit than the run of the mill mexican mangoes). it is the tastiest cake in the world, however, my only concern is that it the birthday cake of choice for everyone's summer birthdays on his side of the family (that's me cutting my fab cake at my 21st birthday). so in a way it screams chinese birthday cake, and while most chinese birthday cakes are fabulous (i think it's all in the real whip cream), a mango cake isn't necessarily your run of the mill chinese birthday cake with its boring seasonally affordable fruit: balled canteloupe and honeydew, kiwi, strawberries, and sometimes orange slices depending on the season. some have had bananas in them, and that just seems wrong.

if they covered the whole cake in whip cream, so i just had a nice white cake on a retro milk glass cake stand .... maybe that would make it less birthday-y?


another option, for just pennies more than the regular sheet cake would be tiramisu!.....what are your thoughts on untraditional wedding cakes? did you/will you have one, or have you been to a wedding with one?

the cake smash

i spent the entire day having a blast from behind the camera, which rendered me undanceworthy and perhaps harder to get a word in with than the bride herself. but when the cake smashing happened, andrew leaned over and said "ohhh....that's what you don't want to happen." jenn and i had had a discussion about how uncouth cake in the face would be, and when i had brought up with andrew he had no idea that it was something people did at weddings. in fact, i wouldn't put it past him to have done it anyway, without even knowing!

how many people out there have the cake-in-the-face-discussion, and how many people out there have this happen, discussion or no discussion?

cakes

i'd never really envisioned my wedding before, but i always assumed some asian bakehouse would create a lovely cake...ie anna's cake house in east van, michelle's bakery in kerrisdale, or goldilocks on broadway. i'm sure they make contemporary, martha-worthy cakes, but everything on their website looks like it's from the 1980's. and bon ton's window display cakes in kitsilano have a layer of dust on them like they truly are from the 1980's. anna's gave some helpful dimension information:

"have the tiers step up in constant increments (ie: 6 - 9 -12 where each tier widens by 3 inches or 8 - 11 - 14, NOT 6 - 8 -16 unless that is the look you are trying to achieve)"


enter: cupcakes (and vanessa's cute new kicks). i prefer betty crocker "muffins" topped with real whipped cream, buttercream is the sickest dessert-related stuff i have ever tasted, but they do cakes as well.

i think they mentioned their wedding cakes start at $8 per slice....which, even if it has fondant i'm sure is the plainest cake with a few strips of grosgrain ribbon. so 8 x 100 = $800.

but, they also have "regular" buttercream cakes which are actually quite cute...and affordable (see pricing, left)!! okay, so following anna's dimensions rule - if i did 7, 11, 13" cakes and tiered them myself, it would run $185 and feed about 112 people with 2" slices (although their wedding cake looks to break the even increment rule with a four incher on top). and i realize tiering these cakes could be disastrous, so even buying three vintage milk glass cake stands and having three 11" cakes would still make martha proud. look how pretty their cakes can be in this price range - they had a mini fridge in the store that had a few of these very same cakes and they really were true to these prices. now i imagine there are equally talented cake makers out there that don't have the overhead of a store located on both denman and broadway.