First of all, you can find me in two other places today! I have a guest post about sidekicks over at the awesome Liv Rancourt’s blog, and I also have my first post over at Spellbound Scribes in which I frame myself and the other lovely scribes as kidnappers and thieves.
But who is eating cake, you ask? I’m referring to our wedding guests, of course. Today we went to a cake tasting at our caterer’s restaurant location.
It was… a little weird.
First of all, as I type this sentence, my computer says it’s 10:22 a.m. Our tasting was at 10. She had us out of there in less than fifteen minutes, which means we both ate the equivalent of a small bundt cake in about ten minutes.
I’m a little shakey and jittery now, but a lot more awake than I was after my morning tea.
Our fiven chosen flavor-slices were arranged on a plate, sort of like this:
But, um, less fancy. And smaller. And not iced. Instead we had a little blob of buttercream icing in the center… eating that blob is probably the reason why I’m feeling a little nauseous, as well as jittery.
But we tried our five flavors (word to the wise: cinnamon roll cake is just not meant for weddings) and picked the three that will actually comprise our three-layer cake. After that, we were just eating cake for a late breakfast.
Apparently choosing whether or not you will cut the top layer of your cake is a fairly big decision. You probably know that many couples freeze that top layer and eat it on their first anniversary. But anything that sits in my freezer for a year, no matter how well wrapped, will taste like freezer and red peppers.
Gross.
So we’re cuttin’ that sucker at the reception!
Incidentally, did you know that the save-it-for-a-year tradition started as saving it for the birth of your first child? True story. Regardless, cake is meant for eating, not freezing.
Anyway, now that you’re a little wiser about the ways of wedding cake, I have to say that the whole experience was a little strange. I was actually looking forward to trying cakes (as any food-loving bride should be!), but the caterer was so brusque and the experience so, well, dull that if I weren’t still feeling the sugar, I’d probably feel a little let-down, like when Anne of Green Gables says she cried the first time she saw a real, colorless diamond, because she expected it to look more like a regal purple amethyst.
I thought we’d be a bit more pampered and that I’d actually get to meet the person baking my cake. The plates were arranged beautiful, and we each had a nice goblet for water, and a fork and napkin and the whole shebang. But the caterer left us to eat our cake in peace, and disappeared until we’d made ourselves giddy with sugar. It was nothing like this:
"A cake, Franck, is made of flour and water."
No Franck, upselling the $1200 cakes or showing me photos from magazines. I told her what I wanted the cake to look like from an image on the internet… And that was it. Presto, we have a wedding cake. Weird.
Readers, have you ever had the surreal experience of doing something you had really looked forward to, only to find it ridiculously mundane? Is it just me?
Kristin McFarland 
Congrats on choosing the cake!! 😀 How funny that it was sort of anticlimactic. After we had our first child, when we were driving home with him for the first time, my husband and I felt the same way. The world just went on, cars whizzing past us on the interstate, as we carted this precious bundle home. Mind-blowing.
HA. Yes, I can imagine how strange that must be. Your entire world has changed–but nothing has changed. Wow. Maybe all big life moments are a little like that.
Your cake person seems sort of unfriendly. Ours was really earthy and blunt, but she gave us a lot of time and even called us a few times to make sure we were happy with the efforts she was making (we had a blue velvet cake, which she’d never attempted before).
If you’re spending that much on a cake, I’d be upset at that kind of brusque-ness.
I’m sort of angry at the wedding industry on your behalf.
LOL thank you. I seem to be having more trouble with rude vendors than you did. I think part of the trouble is that we’re a smallish town with a HUGE wedding market (college students–40,000 of them come through here every school-year, and a quarter of them probably get married here). So we have not many vendors, because it’s a small town, and a lot of competition in high wedding season (like June!), so they get to be rude.
The catering manager (who we saw today) was a lot friendlier at our last meeting. She’s also going to do some of the coordinating, so maybe she was in a bad mood or something.
I found nothing fun about wedding planning, not that I expected it to be. I tried to make it simple but everyone I hired kept asking questions. I think they were so used to stressed out brides who couldn’t make up their minds that they couldn’t wrap their heads around the fact that I knew what I wanted, told them, and was done until the big day.