January 14, 2010

Anyway, this Cake is Great...

...it's so delicious and moist!*

Unfortunately for Chell, the cake was most certainly a lie.  I'll bet that if she had a big, delicious cake waiting for her at the end of her, um, adventures, her tumultuous journey may have been worth it.  Especially if that cake was made by Liz at Creme de la Cake in Fresno!

Remember waaay back in October when I blogged about my cake inspiration?  I was so excited to have found Creme de la Cake, which is truly a diamond in the rough in this area, but I had to wait for Mr. Doxie to get in the country before we had our consultation.  Well, true to form, I put it off for three months.  Not because I wasn't looking forward to nomming on some delish cake, but because, well, I'm a procrastinator.

Last week I shot the owner, Liz, an email to make an appointment, and in her response she informed me that there was only room for one more cake on our wedding day!  This is why it's bad to procrastinate, kids.  We just happened to get lucky; I would have been seriously bummed if she couldn't make our cake.

Anyway, armed with a stack of inspiration photos, and one of my favorite Christmas gifts:


(Cutest cake stand evah from Crate and Barrel)

we headed to Fresno to meet Liz, fill up on some sugar, and come up with an awesome cake design!

Liz was great!  She asked us a few questions, looked at my inspiration photos, grabbed some colored pencils and started drawing out a super cute design right away.  I loved all of her ideas; it really seemed like we were on the same wavelength.

Our first step was to choose the basic shape of the cake.  I was torn between wanting two layers, and wanting a small top layer to freeze for our anniversary.



(Sorry for bad camera phone pictures!)

Ultimately, we decided to go with a small, three-layer cake.

Next up were the flavour (Mr. Doxie's Canadian spellings are rubbing off on me : ) choices!  I really hoped the cakes were as tasty as they are beautiful... really, what good is a gorgeous cake if it's not yummy?


We were given five varieties of cakes to sample.  From left to right:  Red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting, vanilla bean cake with chocolate malted and chocolate fudge buttercream, vanilla bean cake with key lime filling, banana cake (I forgot what kind of frosting, but it was delicious!  Sorry!), annnd German chocolate cake and frosting.


All five were absolutely delicious!  It didn't help that Mr. Doxie and I went hungry, or that we just love cake in general.  I think we both wished the cake samples were a little bigger!

I'm pretty sure this was Mr. D's favorite wedding planning event so far!

It didn't take long for our plate to look like this:


Can you tell which was our favorite?

Liz did an excellent job of pulling elements from all of my inspiration pictures and making the work in one cake design, and I was really excited about what she drew!  I imagined her cake sitting on my cake stand, and it was pretty adorable in my head, let me tell you.

So, in only a matter of about 30 minutes, we came up with a design, chose flavours, and paid the deposit!  I couldn't believe it went so smoothly!  Honestly, I'm very, very grateful that I came across Creme de la Cake during one of my Google sessions.

So we were all set!  We have until ten days before the wedding to make any design changes, though I didn't think I would.

Right as we were leaving, Mr. Dachshund thought of a question to ask, "How well will our top layer hold up in the freezer for a year?"

"Oh, I don't want my clients to eat old, frozen cake!  I'll make you a free anniversary cake, decorated like the top layer of your wedding cake!"

Super, I thought!  A free anniversary cake will be really nice!  We thanked her, and left.

But then, as we were driving away, I remembered that third layer...  should I keep it even if we won't be freezing it?

Up next:  Our cake design!

Was designing your wedding cake a long process, or was it a relatively simple task?



*Props to anyone who got my Portal reference!

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