Cake Tasting 101

I'm gonna level with you... I'm not a big cake fan. What?!?! Yes, you heard that right, I'm not the biggest cake fan. Want an example? There is video from my 4th birthday party where I am enjoying a bowl of ice cream while the rest of my friends are chowing down on my birthday cake. Now that's not to say that I won't eat cake, at special occasions (like weddings) I will take a couple of bites before handing over the rest of my piece to Mr. E.

Because of this, the cake baker was the last major vendor on my list to book. Most brides, or those helping to plan the wedding look forward to booking this vendor. I know that any bridal event that Mama E and I attended, she could always be spotted enjoying the cake samples.  Who doesn't like free cake samples? But I was OK with holding off on booking this until later in the planning process.

Mr. E and I used some vacation days to have a "staycation", so I figured this would be a great time to book some wedding related things like registering and some cake tastings.

As you can see I was prepared with print outs of the cake designs we're looking for

Modeling some dummy cakes while waiting for our samples to be cut.

We were quite impressed with the plate full of samples, frostings, fillings and double dipped strawberries that was presented to us.

Look at all of those different cakes!

The fillings in the middle were:

1. Raspberry

2. Dulce de Leche

3. Cherry

4. Lemon

5. Apricot

6. Strawberry

7. Bavarian Creme

8. Fudge

We tasted the different cakes/frosting with different fillings to determine the ones we liked the most.

Mr. E enjoying this tasty vendor meeting!

This is what was left after our tasting... Can you tell what our favorites were?

For the bride's cake we selected (from bottom to top) White Chocolate with Raspberry filling, White Chocolate with Apricot filling, and Strawberry with Strawberry filling all with Buttercream frosting.  YUM!!! We are lovers of all things strawberry, so we'll probably eat this top tier before our 1 year anniversary! The groom's cake would be the German Chocolate with Dulce de Leche filling.

After deciding our favorite combinations, Molly talked about the styles of cake they could do. Since I was already prepared with the pictures of the travel cake and ideas from the groom's cake, we were able to skip the book of cake pictures. We were super excited when Molly informed us that we could make the groom's cake in the shape of an Xbox 360 and add mini cakes/rice krispie treats in the form of controllers to symbolize the other systems (Wii and Playstation 3) we have in our home. The groom's cake would sort of look like this (picture taken at our house)

We loved the customer service, the taste of the cakes, and most of all the price! Both cakes, with all the additions we wanted including mini cakes for the controllers, fondant pieces for the city names on the bride's cake and double dipped strawberries came up $5 under the budget we set. Score!! Molly even packed up our leftovers, and put in new pieces for the combos we liked so we could share with some family members that night.

We still had two more cake tastings, but neither compared in taste/cost to the first stop so that's who we booked with!

Did you go to several cake tastings when looking for a baker? Will you be having cake or something else at your wedding?