CUPCAKES!

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, we had our cake testing this past Saturday! The bakery was a little far from us...MapQuest put it at a solid 36 minutes. Mike's mom came along and the three of us managed to take every wrong turn possible. We only ended up being 10 minutes late, so no big deal.

This bakery is run by a wife and husband team of chefs. I haven't met or talked to the husband, but the wife is so friendly and amazing. I felt like we all really clicked. I'm realizing more and more that getting along personally with the vendors is a huge deal, and vital to the overall success of the wedding. It's hard to trust someone who isn't nice. Early on when we were looking at reception locations, we talked to this one woman who was just awful. She was very pushy about stupid details (exactly where the cake HAD to be placed, etc.) and was just downright intimidating. I don't understand mean people to begin with... but when we're talking about contracts worth hundreds or thousands of dollars, you'd imagine people would kiss your ass a little (or at least muster up good manners).

Anyways, we went with them! I figured we would- the tasting would have had to of been horrible for us not to. We got to try both vanilla and chocolate cake with raspberry filling on top, and pistachio and banana walnut with chocolate on top. Everything was DELICIOUS! We ended up with red velvet, french vanilla, and banana walnut cupcakes all with butter cream icing; chocolate with chocolate icing; and carrot cake with cream cheese icing. We ordered 40 of each- Mike thinks we'll have to get more. I'm unsure. He's probably right. For our top/cutting/anniversary cake, we got a chocolate cake on top of a vanilla cake with that delicious raspberry filling. It will be frosted with butter cream icing, and they will pipe on branches and ivory hydrangeas. Oh yeah, all of the cupcake icing (minus the chocolate) will be tinted ivory as well.

I am so pleased. It's nice to cross something off our list. The price was really good, and we were able to put half of it down. The less money we have to pay out the week/day of the wedding, the better!

A few last minute wedding items: my BFFs wedding is THIS Saturday(!!) and I was just asked to be a reader in another friend's wedding in May. I'm loving all of this wedding action.

Let Down!

One of the reasons we planned on such a long engagement (about 2 and a half years!), was so that we could afford the things we wanted and not have to compromise too much. Before we even were engaged, we had many of those “well IF we ever got married we COULD…” conversations. Things we were dead set on as a couple were having Jones Soda (customized of course) for our guest’s favors, dancing our first dance to Iron and Wine’s cover of Such Great Heights, and using brown and cream as our color scheme.

Thank you Jones Soda for ruining our dreams! WTH!

Back, probably a year and a half ago or so, we used jonessoda.com to estimate how much it would cost for 175-200 bottles. With shipping, we figured maybe $400-$500 max for soda + shipping. Steep, I know, but it’s what we’ve wanted longer than we knew we wanted each other (ha!) and we were willing to pay the price.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when we went back to the website to start ordering. I want to say the price of the soda remained the same, but the shipping jumped so high that it would actually cost more to ship it to our home than it would to purchase them! With a few clicks of a mouse, our soda dreams died.

So with that, I am having my personal wedding crisis of the hour/day/week/month. I don’t know how other brides are, but I find something stupid to obsess about daily- shoes, hair, Mike, food, etc. I don’t mind it- I think I probably actually like it. I love the wedding planning process. Anyways, so now I have favors on the brain.

I know what I do not want – chocolate anything, charity favors, bubbles, or bells. No real particular reason for not wanting any of those, I/we just don’t. I guess I like unique consumables. Maybe keepsakes that aren’t cheesy.

I’m thinking maybe I’ll start making apple butter in my crock and jarring it. I don’t think that would cost too much money- the ingredients are super cheap and I bet I can get an excellent deal on jars somewhere. I feel like it might fit our general aesthetic and vibe, too. Apple butter…trees…birds…sort of natural and organic, without being weird and hippie. Maybe we could go to an orchard and pick the apples ourselves? The Knot has favor tags that match our save the dates (brown with a while bird on a branch) – that might be cute to tie around the lid with twine or something.

Decisions, decisions. I still want the soda.

nom nom nom

First, I changed the blog name to something that made more sense and sounded better! I might remove the quotation marks, what do you think?

Second; about two weeks ago, I e-mailed a local baker about meeting up and placing a deposit down to hold our date. A few days ago, I still hadn't heard back from the company (still haven't, btw), so I checked into another one. I left a message on their site, and within 12 hours I had two e-mails and one phone call from them! We have a (cup)cake testing two weeks from tomorrow! I'm so excited. It's going to be tough figuring out if we want multiple flavors or just one. I'm thinking 3 or 4 different flavors, but we'll see!

One last thing, I think I might buy the supplies to try and make something like this:

..doesn't seem too hard!