Wedding Friday: Preserving the top of your cake

I'm a few days late on this post, so today we have "Wedding Friday".  "Wedding Wednesday" has a much better ring to it, but just go with it for this week. :)

As I mentioned a few posts ago, Mr. Bear and I recently celebrated our 1st anniversary as husband and wife!  In keeping with tradition, we saved the top tier of our wedding cake to eat on our anniversary.

After defrosting, it actually still tasted pretty good!  I had been nervous because most other married couples said theirs tasted horrible.  I wanted to share how our cake was preserved in the hopes that others may have a similar experience (good cake).

First and foremost, you have to start with a delicious cake. Ours was super moist at our wedding, and it had about 1/2" of buttercream frosting on the outside that locked in the flavor.

Second, make sure whoever is baking the cake knows you want to keep the top tier of the cake.  Our bakery left the caterer a small box for the top tier.  This made it easier to take home.  You will also want to make sure that your venue/caterer/whoever is cutting up the cake to serve knows that you want to keep the top tier of the cake so they don't cut it up and serve it.  Additionally if you are saving the cake and it has a filling that needs to be refrigerated, make sure to tell your venue/caterer so they can keep it in the fridge for you until the end of the night (or the following day if you are collecting all of your items in the morning).

After you take your cake top, you will want to take the box and put the entire box into a plastic bag.  We used tall kitchen trash bags for this and tied them off in the middle of the bag to create a tighter seal.

We then wrapped the cake in one more kitchen bag before placing in my parents' ice chest.  We let the cake freeze, untouched for several weeks until we came home from our honeymoon and were able to pick it up.

The cake then was transferred into our freezer and remained there until our first anniversary.

A few days before our anniversary, I took the cake out of the freezer(still in the plastic) and placed in the fridge to defrost.  After 2 days, we then cut into and ate the cake.  It wasn't as moist as the original servings, but it was still pretty tasty!

Here is a look at our cake after we cut into it:

-Danielle

Wedding Wednesday: Let them eat cake!

Yummy, yummy, yummy!  Who wants cake!?!

Today's Wedding Wednesday post is about the ever important star of the dessert world...wedding cake!

Truth be told, I'm not a HUGE fan of cake, however,  I love red velvet with cream cheese frosting!  Because of this, I couldn't justify the huge amount of money it would have cost to have a tiered cake large enough to feed all of our guests.



Let me introduce you to this wonderful thing called the sheet cake!

Almost all of the bakeries I looked at for our wedding made sheet cakes at a fraction of the cost of a tiered cake.  We ended up with a three tier cake plus two sheet cakes (one in red velvet and one in black forest chocolate)  I had budgeted $700 for our cake.  The tiered cake came out to about $300 (way below budget) with the two 1/2 sheet cakes totaling around $100.  Since we had a couple hundred dollars to spare, we ended up purchasing a few more desserts for guests like me, who don't love cake.  In total, we got a three tier cake, two sheet cakes, 4 cheesecakes, a cannoli tray, chocolate covered strawberries, and a cookie tray for well below my budgeted cost.

Things to note if you are going for a sheet cake:

1. My bakery offered single or double sheet cakes.  We went with the double sheet cake that has a filling so that guests wouldn't feel like they were getting slighted if they got a piece cut from the sheet cake.  Make sure you ask your baker about this option if it is important to you

2. Many bakeries do full or half sheets.  Note that if you are doing sheet cakes, you can only have one flavor of cake with filling and frosting per pan.  We did one 1/2 sheet cake as chocolate and one as red velvet.

Of course if you really dislike cake, there are tons of other options: Cookies, pies, brownies, doughnuts, cream puffs, etc.

The nice thing about the wedding cake is that you can really customize it any way you like!

Other tips for finding your cake:

1. Make sure you have a tasting.  Many of the bakeries around here have begun charging for tastings, however, the fee is waived if you purchase a cake from them.

We only did a tasting at one bakery and decided it was too delicious and cost effective not to go with them.
Make sure you find out if the tasting has a fee.  I will give a shameless plug for the amazing cakes they do at Michael Angelo's Bakery!

2. Go in with an idea of how you want it decorated, but don't be afraid to tweak after talking to the bakery.
 I had a general idea of what we wanted for the cake decoration, but the bakery had a ton of photos of cakes past that I ended up borrowing from to create ours.  The nicest part was they the bakery could reference those cakes and they were able to point us to designs that were similar but more cost effective.

3. Know where you will have the cake on display at your venue, it may impact your decision on frosting vs. fondant.

I don't like the taste of fondant, however, it usually holds up better in the heat.  I knew we were getting married in July and it would likely be hot in any of the outdoors spaces.  I did, however, know that where the cake was going to be was air conditioned so I felt comfortable purchasing buttercream.

We still had a little sliding by the time we got to the cake, but it would have completely melted if it was outdoors.

(notice how the top tier is not level...we had a bit of a melting situation on our hands)

4.  Figure out if you want to keep the top tier of your cake for your anniversary.  This will alter the amount of cake you will need to order.

5.   Make sure you get a piece of cake (besides just the small piece you cut during the cake cutting).  We didn't have that much foresight into the fact that we likely wouldn't get a piece.  Fortunately our coordinaters set aside a piece of each for us for after the wedding.

-Danielle