Wedding, the dessert buffet!

On to happier food topics!

We decided on our cakes months before the wedding. Vanilla Bake Shop is our favorite LA bakery (I'm sure I just managed to offend 90% of my LA readers - bakeries are a divisive topic) and their custom wedding cakes are gorgeous, but way out of our price range ($800 minimum!). Their standard cakes are amazing and we figured out that 6 cakes (two 12" wide and four 9" wide) would easily serve our 140ish guests. They did.

We settled on flavors, I measured all my cake stands (this forced me to take inventory and it was embarrassing - let's just say what you see here is less than half of what I own) and picked out 6 that would work well together and then we did nothing until the week before the wedding, when we ordered the cakes. It came out to $420 total.

To fill it out (and because D is very much a cookie person rather than a cake person) I made 4 batches each of 4 different types of cookies, plus brownies, and spent about $80 on ingredients. I knocked out the dough in a few hours (I have a KitchenAid and an affinity for speedy assembly line baking). Baking the actual cookies sucked a bit, because it was so dang hot the week before the wedding. In light of our food disaster, I was so, so grateful that I didn't blow off the cookies, as tempting as it was at the time.

I knew that I could trust our wedding planners to set up our dessert buffet, but I was secretly hoping I'd find time to do it myself. You guys know how I feel about cake stands. While our friends hung our streamers on Saturday morning, I arranged the table, leaving notes so that it would be clear which cakes and cookies were going where. It was totally OCD. I loved it.

And of course, Michelle and Anna executed it perfectly. Michelle picked up the cakes for me (which eliminated a big logistical hurdle!) and drove them to the venue and then put everything out. I slipped out to see the final product just as guests were starting to arrive and nearly cried. I mean, the cookies were arranged in swirls. It was a work of art.

{dessert buffet - photos by melissa of happy confetti photography}

It didn't last for very long, of course. In lieu of appetizers, lots of guests decided to start on cookies prior to dinner, and I could only applaud their wise decision. I would have joined in, eagerly, had I not been sequestered in the bridal suite.

We bought bakery boxes so that people could take home leftovers and it was a great move. There is always cake left at weddings and it kills me to see it get thrown away. We offered up the boxes at the end of the night and there was barely a scrap leftover. We smuggled out a couple bags of cookies and a piece of cake for our honeymoon.

For desserts, we spent $420 on cake + $80 on cookie ingredients + $30 on bakery boxes (I bought 80 boxes and we could have gone with 40 and it would have been fine - it seemed to be about one box per family and not everyone took anything home) + $40 on vintage cake servers + $15 on industrial cake knives. That was calculated to feed 150 people and it was more than enough.

It got a little chaotic after we cut the cake. Having six different cakes is a little tricky. In retrospect, I should have picked out one person to cut and serve each cake and then had an empty table nearby for the cut slices to go on. This would have made it much smoother. Heads up to anyone planning a dessert buffet sans caterer. I finally get the cupcakes at weddings craze.

And I know it is so cliche, but the only taste of cake I got that night was the ceremonial photo op bite. Sad.

{cake cutting - photo by melissa of happy confetti photography}

Right after I typed that I realized that it isn't true. I did get to eat some of the leftovers back in our hotel room at 3 am with my bare hands, and was joined enthusiastically by several of our friends. So that works too. Just make sure you get someone to package something for you. And maybe remember to include forks.

And because I'm still obsessed with our cake topper ...

{by day - photo by melissa of happy confetti photography}

{by night - photo by melissa of happy confetti photography}

It lives on our bookshelf currently, and I think it's probably the one piece of the wedding decor that we'll keep forever.