Cake!

So we finally booked a baker! I know I told you I tasted some cake a couple months ago, and then I let the issue drop.

At the end of January, we went to visit Eric's sister and her new baby. It coincidentally was also Eric's sister's husband's 30th birthday that weekend. I decided it would be good to have some cake, so I set up a couple tastings to pick up and bring with me.

One was from Adrienne's, and they asked me to pick out six flavors to try. I was amazed when we opened the box:

This is the after-we-devoured-cake shot, but I think you can tell that it was six full slices of cake. They were actually all put right next to each other and then iced to look like one complete cake, so I didn't know what to expect! We tried white, lemon, strawberry, red velvet, raspberry, and Italian cream. You can see the 3-0 candles we picked up to celebrate Brian's birthday, too. Free sample cake for someone else's birthday... ghetto, perhaps, but that's how I roll. It was fun to get to taste everything with Paige and Brian, too.

Strawberry was the clear winner, although it is a very shocking pink. After I got back, I set up a consultation with Adrienne (she does her consultations after the taste test, which is awesome), and got pricing and design info. Adrienne is awesome and very friendly, and I'm happy I met with her.

Everything stayed in limbo until Eric came to visit last week for Match Day. I arranged to pick up tastings from 4 bakeries: Plehn's, which I had previously tasted by myself, Bussmann's, Williams, and Adrienne's (for a comparative taste test). There was another tasting but it turned out it would have cost us $20, and I figured there are enough bakeries that will give us free cake that I didn't need to worry about a place that would charge us for a tasting (plus, I already knew their prices and they were the most expensive yet!).

Here's what we collected and assembled at the apartment:

Plehn's, yellow and strawberry:
Since they knew I was picking up the tasting to taste later, they included their icing in a little waxed paper cone for us to dispense ourselves. That's my icing handiwork pictured. I've always wanted to do that!


Williams Bakery, yellow iced with chocolate and chocolate iced with white/yellow:


Bussmann's, 2 chocolate cupcakes and I think 4 yellow cupcakes. The fact that there are 4 made me think that maybe I actually ordered 2 yellow and 2 something else (lemon?), but I didn't taste any difference, so I'm not sure what happened there...


And Adrienne's, where we picked up a slice of strawberry cake. I was totally going to pay for it, since it was a repeat tasting, but they gave it to us for free!


And here is the aftermath:
From left to right: Plehn's, Williams on the plate, Adrienne's pink strawberry, and Bussman's cupcakes in the box.

The clear winner was Adrienne's. it was moist and flavorful, absolutely scrumptious. Plehn's was not too far behind in second -- very moist and light cake, but their strawberry wasn't as flavorful as Adrienne's. Adrienne's was also the most expensive, but we're so happy with the cake that it's totally worth it. (It's still within our original budget.)

So it's going to be a three-tiered strawberry cake with whipped cream filling, iced white and decorated with fresh flowers. I'm really excited for wedding cake now!

Cake for me!

I've been putting off looking for a baker for our cake, for a variety of reasons. First, I just knew it was going to be expensive -- I had checked out a couple local bakers who put prices on their website and I just couldn't stomach it. $3+/slice? It just seems ridiculous when the slices are so small and you can buy a whole box of cake mix for less than $2. (I'm aware that $3/slice is pretty standard for wedding cake, at least in this area, and I can only count my blessings that I'm not getting married in New York.)

(It's probably pretty clear, but I'm not a cake snob. My favorite cake is any sort of from-a-box chocolate cake. No icing.)

Plus, since Eric no longer lives here in Louisville, it would be so depressing to go to all of these cake consultations by myself, and just not fair for me to get to taste the cake without him. Delicious, but not fair.

But this weekend, with the calendar ticking away before my eyes, I got serious and started the research end of things. I made a list of as many bakeries as I could find in town, and made a few phone calls. It turns out a lot of bakeries are closed on Mondays, which I didn't know. Anyway, I ended up with an appointment for two days from now for a consultation and tasting, and I just figure that if everything works out OK price-wise and initial tasting-wise, I can always bring Eric back the next time he visits for a confirmatory tasting.

I called another bakery who gave me a price quote over the phone, and I asked about the often-mentioned strategy of having a small display cake and sheet cake to make up the difference. It turns out this is pretty economical, so I was excited and invigorated to do more cake searching.

Then I spent the rest of the evening pulling together pictures of cakes to send to Eric, in order to get his opinions on decorations, before I go to these consultations. It just wouldn't be nice of me to order a big purple cake covered in pink sugar flowers, you know? I'll share my inspiration photos with you later.

But today, when I was out running errands, I drove by one of the more well-known bakeries in town. I decided to pop in and see if they could just give me information -- I wasn't expecting to taste cake or anything like that. And the consultant was nice enough to sit down with me and write up a quote for me on the spot. This bakery doesn't price by the slice; instead, they start with the appropriately sized basic yellow cake with white icing and standard, unfancy decoration, and go up from there for colors, flavors, fillings, etc. But still, their quote was very reasonable, especially with the small-cake-plus-sheet-cake strategy, and I started to warm up to the whole cake thing.

And the best part? She offered to give me some cake to go! "Just a second and I'll ice a couple pieces for you. Just tell me what flavors you'd like."

And so I left Plehn's Bakery with a yellow cupcake and a piece of strawberry cake.

Mmmmm. The yellow cupcake was really really really really good. Light and moist. The icing was pretty standard buttercream -- I don't really like icing, so I scraped it off, but it tasted like good buttercream. I ate it for -- I mean, in addition to -- my lunch, because it was lunchtime. (Seriously, I stopped at Whole Foods and picked my way through the store sampling the freebies, pondered for a long time over the prepared foods bar, and settled on some sushi. After I ate the cupcake.) I had the strawberry cake just a little while ago, eating it in front of the webcam for Eric to see (and envy), and it was pretty good. It wasn't particularly strawberry-y, and it wasn't quite as moist as the yellow, but that might be because it sat in the box all day, I'm not sure. Still very good cake, don't get me wrong.

So, depressing single consultations and unfair solo tastings? Who cares! I'm going to keep tasting as much cake as I can! Who knew there were all these perks to planning a wedding? This might have to become a habit of ours in the years to come.... ;)

Dreams/Nightmares

I woke up this morning in the middle of a really weird dream. We were at my friend Jamie's wedding, but instead of the fancy, black-tie-requested affair that it was, in my dream it was a little more informal -- like most other weddings I've been to, not that it wasn't formal at all. I wasn't a bridesmaid, and for some reason I didn't think that was weird, especially given that in real life I was a bridesmaid, and Eric and I got seated at a table with all of Jamie's friends from when she lived in Ohio -- which has never happened in real life.

Then the DJ started doing his thing, and his thing turned out to be this weird dinner theater stuff, where the whole bridal party was enacting a murder scene or something. I think the premise was that one of the bridesmaids had shot Jamie, and now the place was on fire and a real fire engine even showed up. Except throughout these events, my attitude was, "Oh my god, this DJ is so cheesy and lame. I guess I give him props for actually getting a real fire engine to show up, but this is so obviously all faked."

I don't know what happened next, because I woke up. Definitely a weird dream, and one of those dreams where in the dream, you know it's weird.

The one interesting thing about the dream was the food. The dinner was a buffet, and Eric and I were among the first to get our food. The buffet was a whole series of dishes that had nothing to do with each other but that I knew were Jamie's favorite things (they were dream-Jamie's favorites, anyway). Lots of Indian food (served on too-small platters with too-large serving utensils), and then a huge plate of barbecue ribs, and a bunch of stuff on a ghetto candy buffet
(like, it looked like a kid dumped out his Halloween bag on the table, not one of those nice buffets everyone's doing now). My reaction was positive -- "Oh look, these are all of Jamie's favorite foods! How nice!" even though the food was all pretty unconnected to each other and would have made for a weird dinner.

Maybe it's a sign? We're in the middle stages of picking a caterer and finalizing our wedding menu, so maybe my subconscious wants me to stop figuring out which vegetables go with seared tuna and just serve naan and ribs with dim sum and snow crab legs with drawn butter. Now that's an idea.
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I don't think I ever shared my first wedding nightmare with you. It happened about a month ago, and it was one of those totally vivid dreams where everything is REAL (and usually going badly) and there is nothing you can do about it. In the dream, it was my wedding day, only it was actually that same day in July that I was having the dream -- in other words, I had to go ahead with the wedding with only whatever planning had gotten done up to that point. So we had a place and a photographer, and that was about it. For some reason, I wasn't freaking out about the fact that we had no caterer and I can't remember what the wedding dress situation was, but my #1 concern was that my hair was all messed up. [I often sleep with my hair in a loose pony tail to keep it out of my face at night] and I apparently had to get married with my hair looking the way it did at that very moment, because there were no bobby pins or curling irons or anything to be found. So it was going to be messy, half-pony tail half-pull-through-bun, with pieces sticking out everywhere. It was quite frustrating.

So I guess I've passed a milestone of some sort, where the wedding planning anxiety, though still very mild, is important enough to invade my subconscious while I sleep. These are the only two wedding dreams I've had so far, and as long as they keep occurring no more than once a month, I can handle it. Maybe I should pay attention to my subconscious, though, and finish with the catering plans and figure out what I'm going to do with my hair.

EtOH!

That would be ethanol, aka alcohol. Woohoo!

Last fall, my brother had a part-time job at a liquor store to make some extra cash. It sounded like a pretty easy job for him: some stocking, manning the cash register of a not-horrendously-busy liquor store, helping to run wine tasting parties, and learning a decent amount about wine. It was a great job for me, because he got to purchase things at wholesale, and I had a wedding to plan.

Going into venue hunting, we knew that we had to be allowed to bring in our own alcohol, to take advantage of our amazing hook-up. I had a pretty good idea of how ridiculously pricey catered alcohol can be, and I didn't want to have to skimp in this area.

[Glassworks actually is supposed to charge us a $300 fee for using our own alcohol, but we will still come out ahead. Plus, at this point, they haven't charged us the fee, and I'm not really sure how they are going to figure out whose alcohol we are using. Oh well. We'll see what happens come May.]

It was pretty fun to come up with our bar needs. We knew we were going to have an open bar, and wanted to offer liquor, wine, and beer. I had alcohol options from two different hotels I had (very) briefly considered, so I could see what they brands they suggested for their "house," "call," and "premium/top shelf" liquor packages.

Next I checked out online drink calculators. Evite has a drink calculator, and I also found this calculator and guide. I also found out that even though evite gives you results in whole liters, alcohol generally comes in either 750mL or 1.75L bottles, not 1L ones. It was a little stressful to try to run all the calculations not really knowing how many people we're going to have (150 is the number we're using, but it will likely be less than that), but in the end, a good rule of thumb is that too much alcohol is always better than too little :)

We bought the liquor first, back in January, because it was convenient for my brother to do so and I knew we could store the liquor safely for pretty much forever. I also figured that we should probably have enough for two separate bars, because I hate long bar lines, so I bought accordingly. Here's what we got:

• Two 1.75L bottles of Smirnoff vodka
• Two 1.75L bottles of Tanqueray gin
• Two 1.75L bottles of Knob Creek bourbon
• One 1.75L bottle of Bacardi rum
• One 750mL bottle of Bacardi rum
• Two 1.75L bottles of Johnnie Walker red scotch
• (We also already had an unoped 1.75L bottle of Bacardi, so now we're saving that for the wedding as well.)

I didn't really feel any need to have tequila, since (in my opinion) they're pretty much best used for margaritas, and we'll have enough mixed drink options without margaritas, and the only other good use for them is shots, and, well... tequila shots and I do not get along. (Actually, we got along fabulously initially, but then things take a turn for the worse.)

The bourbon was a little stressful; Kentucky is obvious bourbon country, and we needed a good one. However, since a lot of bourbons aren't marketed aggresively outside of Kentucky, the store where my brother worked didn't keep a lot of them in stock. (And to be completely honest, he wasn't really supposed to be buying things at cost; as long as he was buying from the store's stock, though, the assistant manager didn't mind. Because of this, though, we were trying to avoid having him place any special orders.) But, Knob Creek is a good bourbon, so I'm happy.

We weren't planning to buy the wine or beer until next spring, closer to the wedding, because I was worried about storing it. However, my brother called me back in April to announce that he had given his two weeks' notice, and that if I wanted wine, I should act soon. Yikes!

When it comes to wine, I do not like merlot or chardonnay, which are the standard wine offerings at a lot of weddings I've been to. My go-to choices are pinot noir and pinot grigio, and I have a few other reds I'm partial to as well. Eric has a broader palate than I do, but in general we agree on wines, which always makes it nice when we order a bottle at a restaurant. Don't get me wrong, though; I am by no means a wine connoisseur, and if I were doing a blind taste test, I can't guarantee that I wouldn't declare a merlot quite palatable.

In the end, the wedding isn't all about me (shocker!), or even about me and Eric, so we're providing a wider selection of wine. Here's what we got:

• Three 1.5L bottles of Rex Goliath chardonnay
• Four 1.5L bottles of Yellow Tail chardonnay
• Six 1.5L bottles of Fish Eye pinot grigio
• Six 750mL bottles of Rex Goliath pinot noir
• Six 750mL bottles of Yellow Tail pinot noir
• Three 1.5L bottles of Rex Goliath cabernet sauvignon
• Three 1.5L bottles of Yellow Tail cabernet sauvignon
• Six 750mL bottles of Yellow Tail rose

These are brands (Rex Goliath, especially) that we like a lot, so I'm comfortable with what we got. I know they're not super amazing wines if you have much of a wine palate, but I'm also fairly certain that none of our guests is really going to be able to tell the difference. I also know that a lot of caterers offer simply a merlot and chardonnay in a "house" brand of some sort, so I feel that what we're doing is at least a step and a half above that.

We also went ahead and got champagne; just enough for everyone to have a toast. At first, my brother recommended Freixenet extra dry; it's a cava, which is a Spanish sparkling wine. I was able to get my hands on a bottle before my friend Jamie's wedding back in April, and we all had a taste. It was a little too dry for my liking, and I was going to stress about choosing one that I really liked, when again, I realized that at a lot of fancy hotel weddings (such as the black tie one that Jamie had), they simply offer whatever their house champagne is, and no one has a choice. So I let go, told my brother it was too dry, and when he suggested the St. Hilaire semi-sweet as an alternate, we went with it. In the end, it really doesn't matter.

All the liquor and wine is now sitting in my parents' basement, in the storage closet behind the Christmas decorations, and my brother even bought a dehumidifier for the closet to keep everything nice and un-damp (my parents' house is in Maryland, very near to two different rivers and the Chesapeake Bay, so un-damp is hard to come by), and someone will be driving it to Louisville next May.

It doesn't look like too much here, but I didn't open up all those boxes to take a good look; the Christmas decorations were in the way and I didn't feel like moving them all!


The only thing we have left to buy is beer, and we're definitely going to wait on that, because storing beer is asking for trouble. We're going to provide mostly Yuengling, which can't be bought in Kentucky, so someone will be driving more alcohol west come May. I guess we'll also provide a light beer of some sort, but we'll most likely just get that locally.

We'll also buy some mixers, like vermouth for martinis, and maybe some liqueurs, but maybe not. We'll also have sodas and something else non-alcoholic, like iced tea or lemonade, and we'll most likely buy all of that at one of the club stores in the weeks before the wedding. One of the caterers we're interviewing right now pointed out that to have both the ceremony and ensuing cocktail hour on the roof, an extra bar would either need to be pre-set up on the roof (meaning more money for another bartender and a bar in our ceremony space), or we should opt for passed drinks only during cocktail hour. I really like the idea of passed drinks for cocktail hour, because then we have an excuse to come up with signature drinks! Right now I'm thinking about mint juleps (naturally) and mojitos, as well as mint iced tea (sense a theme?).

All of that alcohol cost us about $750, and will create (roughly) 500 drinks. The hotel caterer, on the other hand, would have charged us $6 per drink! I'm pretty sure we have way too much alcohol (we don't even have the beer yet!), but better safe than sorry. I also know we have some groomsmen who would be more than happy to take some of the extra home.

Ladyfingers Catering Tasting Event

Looking for a caterer in Louisville? I got this email the other day (unfortunately, I won't be able to attend, since I'm still here at the beach):

LADYFINGERS CATERING

12901 Old Henry Rd

LOUISVILLE KY 40223

Ph:502-245-773

ladyfingers@iglou.com www.ladyfingersinc.com

For Your Upcoming Events…

Wedding, Christmas Party, Company Picnic, or Gala

We would like to invite you to our Open House Tasting

Thursday July 17, 2008

6:00 PM to 8:00 PM

Please RSVP include event date or coordinators name/company

*If you have any special request for the tasting please let us know when you RSVP*

Limit 2 tickets per Party – additional tickets available at $15.00 per person

Donna Brown
Marketing Director
Ladyfingers Catering
12901 Old Henry Rd.
Louisville KY 40223
502-245-7734

Proud Exclusive Caterer for The Barnstable Brown Party and The Kentucky Bourbon Festival

It sounds like it's free for up to 2 people. Good deal for free food (which every medical student is always on the lookout for)!