Making your own Wedding Cake
We had 4 cakes at our wedding. FOUR. My husband was convinced that we wouldn't have enough dessert otherwise and that people would think it was tacky.
I am by no means a professional baker, but I made my own wedding cake. I like making birthday cakes and chocolate chip cookies. But somewhere early on in the wedding planning process, I got caught up in pretty Pinterest pictures and decided that I could definitely make my own wedding cake, as long as I kept things simple.
It's not just the photo - that cake is tilted. |
I also live in France, meaning there is only one shop in town that makes American-style wedding cakes and they are super expensive - about $900 for 3 tiers and 100 parts. This is before you start adding decorations like ribbon, flowers, etc. They aren't terrible, but they also aren't nearly as pretty as you would see in a real America cake shop. Moreover, just to complicate things further, apparently they are dry and don't taste very good. That just wasn't going to work for me.
A few months before the wedding, a lot of our friends and acquaintances kept mentioning how they couldn't wait to go to a French-American wedding and see a real live wedding cake. I ended up being some what obligated.
Now, you should know that French wedding cakes are delicious, but notoriously ugly. Here's a picture of the traditional French wedding cake we had at our wedding.
It's basically a tower of cream puffs covered with caramel. Yummy? YES! Pretty? Not so much...
We also had a Macaroon Wedding Cake. It looked like this:
Do I recommend making your own Wedding Cake?
Good heavens, no. It was a nightmare. I was in tears every single day the last two weeks before our wedding because making a 4 tier cake is not as easy as it looks on Pinterest. The guest's were thrilled to see a real-live American wedding cake ("Just like in the movies), but it wasn't worth the psychological toll. This was definitely my biggest DIY regret for the wedding.
I love that you had 4 wedding cakes! And I want to eat all of them!
ReplyDeleteI do think it's awesome that you added that bit of Americana to your reception though. I've been to three French weddings and I have to admit, that the desserts (although delicious) don't seem very 'wedding-like' to me.
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