We are knee deep in invitations right now, which is why this post is a little late this morning. But the calligraphy is completely done and I’ve started on the envelope lining. I’m still waiting on the actual invitations to arrive so we can start the DIY portion of them, as well as a custom rubber stamp we ordered from Etsy for the return address. That being said, let’s talk about cake!

But first a little history on how our cake baker literally fell into our lives. One of my bridesmaids Lauren told me that one of her co-worker’s girlfriends was an amazing cake baker. My initial thought was “well I don’t really know this person, and working with friends can be awkward if I get bossy things go wrong”. Well weeks went by and Derek and I went to have dinner with some friends at a food truck park. All of a sudden we ran into one of Lauren’s co-workers Max and his girlfriend who we hadn’t met yet so we asked them to join our table. We all got to talking and were getting to know his girlfriend when all of a sudden she was like “wait! Are you guys THE Derek and Catharine? Like from the blog?” Um.. yes yes we are. “I’m the cake baker!” Ohhhhhhhh everything makes sense now! It was like a lightbulb went off. So the rest of the evening was spent discussing cake, sharing my pinterest cake board with her, and exchanging contact information.

Fast forward to a month ago when wee had our first cake tasting with Carrie. We had sent a few emails back and forth discussing flavors and decided we wanted to keep things simple with flavors that everyone loves. And to stay away from nuts for all of the peanut allergies out there. She ended up making us a sample of vanilla with buttercream, strawberry with buttercream, and chocolate with chocolate ganache. And they were YUMO.

As you can see the strawberry was my favorite and Derek devoured the chocolate. But we knew that not everyone loved strawberry so we decided to divide the cakes up a bit where my cake would have the bottom tier vanilla and the top tier strawberry with buttercream between each layer, while Derek’s cake would be half chocolate with chocolate ganache between each layer and half strawberry with buttercream between each layer.

After discussing the overall look of my cake we decided to not use fondant because 1. it’s gross, and 2. the textures I wanted didn’t require it so we got to skip it all together yay! I’m not going to show you what my actual cake looks like because it’s a surprise, but here are some of the cakes I was inspired by for the overall look.

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As you can see I’m more drawn to the taller cakes with a smaller diameter and less tiers. We need it to serve 140 people so Carrie calculated that the bottom tier with be 3 layers of a 10″ diameter cake with a 2 layer 6″ diameter top tier. That being said this means we won’t have a traditional top tier to remove and save for our anniversary so we’re trying to figure out how to do that. Has anyone else had this issue? What did you do? Have the baker make you your own tier to take home or just saved a piece from your actual cake? How do you guys feel about buttercream vs. fondant?

We’ve also decided to provide our own cake stand and we initially thought of this Martha Stewart one on our registry:

And just remove the dome for the wedding so that we aren’t having to buy something we won’t use later. The only problem is that it’s on back order and I can’t remember the diameter of it. Online it says 12″ but I think that means it’s 12″ tall because a similar stand is clearly smaller in diameter and says it’s 19″ which is obviously the height. Does anyone have this stand from Macys, or know how big it is? Here are some others that we like though in case this one doesn’t work out.

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I thought about making my own, but with a cake that heavy I don’t trust the glue to hold for that long. Does anyone in the area have a 12″ cake stand of a similar style to these that I could borrow? Any help or ideas would be wonderful :)

PS: don’t forget to enter our giveaway this week, it ends tomorrow night!