Restoring My Faith In Cakes

I love cake. Cake is glorious – what else can come in such a variety of forms, from sweet to savoury. What else can combine the possibility of flavours with an almost unparalleled platform for expression of personality?

So, for Sharon and I the wedding cake was going to be important. However, getting it right has proved to be tricky. We wanted our cake to have bags of our personality, but we also wanted it to be extremely tasty. We didn’t want it to be obscure or crass, but neither did we want it to look like it had fallen out of a Littlewoods wedding catalogue circa 1973.

Combined with this was our budget – as I seem to keep going on about, we don’t have a huge amount to spend – the bulk of our budget is in the venue and catering, so we wanted to make sure that the cake wasn’t going to be too expensive.

Now, to be honest, I have no idea where Sharon found her, but she found the totally rocking Charlotte from Restoration Cake.

Ok, so where's your portion?

We soon had a meeting set up to chat through our ideas for a bespoke wedding cake, but this was well in advance so I had a good amount of time to ponder just exactly what it was that we wanted.

Now, being a geek most of my ideas revolved around a combination of Ace of Cakes and various geek-themed extravaganzas: Star Wars cake toppers, Steam Punk cakes in faux wood and brass decorations, and not to forget one idea about a cake shaped like a companion cube from the computer game Portal. This caused more than a few arguments, as I was desperate to get some of my personality across – as I felt otherwise it would be swept away in some frilly white morass to appease the in-laws.

I was an arse to be frank, and I finally realised that actually I really had to bend a bit on this one – after all Sharon’s Mum and Dad have had a big hand in the budget and having something totally geeky was  more about me than us. Sharon understands and tolerates my insatiable geekiness, but that’s not to say she’s on the same level as me in that respect. A geeky cake would only work if both the bride and groom are both steeped in geek!

When we finally met up with Charlotte to discuss ideas, she was a total legend – I tend to have idea diarrhoea, and typically they fell from my mouth like a Jim Carrey film on fast forward. Charlotte was so patient with us (in other words me) and really helped temper my extreme enthusiasm into getting out some really productive concepts. Not to mention discussing all of the amazing options that we had to decide on for flavours and colours!

Charlotte came back to us a week or so later with our cake concept drawing and while she freely admits she’s an expert baker and not an expert artist, it totally conveyed a cake that was quintessentially us, incorporating aspects of our stationery, style and finishing up with a topper that will link into the groomsmen’s buttonholes – an aspect that totally reflects my personality as I have made them!

So, there is my cake story so far. I honestly can’t wait to see it on the big day, and more importantly can’t wait to eat it!

STD

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