Sunday, May 3, 2009

Another Friendor: Cake

Have I mentioned that I have a VERY talented group of friends? I have found another vendor in my circle of friends. I actually have to credit Facebook with opening my eyes to my friend K's cake decorating talent. I started seeing her post pictures of these wonderfully decorated cakes so I asked her last Sunday if she would be able to make the sunflower cupcakes that I was hoping to have for the wedding.

I had originally asked another acquaintance's mom (who is has done multiple cakes for recent baby/bridal showers) but she wanted $5 a cupcake - OUCH! After that quote I called the 3 local bakeries in town. None of them were able to make the cupcakes in the flavors we wanted, and none were able to make the sunflowers I wanted.

I armed my friendor K with these inspiration photos and asked for carrot , chocolate peanut butter and either a vanilla or marble.



This morning K arrived at church with this box:


These are my favorites out of her samples:




I cut into one of the chocolate peanut butter cupcakes:


They were a little dried out from being made earlier this week, but the peanut butter center was really good. My dad didn't like that there were some peanuts in the cake part. I am going to ask K if she can eliminate those in the recipe.

I don't like the piped icing sunflowers on the cake, but I cut a slice and it was really good. That says a lot because I don't like carrot cake. K and I are going to try some other designs for the small cutting cake. I will also need to decide what flavor we want it to be, I am leaning more towards the vanilla/marble.

To combine our favorite designs with the flavors I am going to ask K to use a different design for each flavor.
The chocolate peanut butter will have three small sunflowers:


The vanilla/marble will have a single sunflower:


The carrot cake will have a plain cream cheese frosting instead of the buttercream like the above samples.

We will probably do one more tasting/trial run just to nail down the final details.

How many cake tastings or trials did your cake baker do for you?

1 comment:

Jamie said...

Great questions!

Well, as a professional decorator, I can tell you we don't do free trial runs of cake designs. We sketch up designs for a potential client that they can approve or request changes to if they wish, whatever it takes to get the perfect look. Having a good portfolio of previous work to show the bride helps them determine whether or not the decorator is "up to the task", or if they need to go somewhere else.

People should absolutely shop around for the best tasting cake as well. There are bakers who use box mixes off the shelf, there are bakers who use doctored recipes, and there are those that create everything from scratch using top shelf ingredients; all resulting in different tastes and textures.

I encourage all brides to shop around, as this is their big day, and the cake should be the second most beautiful element of their wedding. The first of course being the gorgeous bride. You don't get a "do over" when it comes to your wedding.

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