Butter, Sugar, Flour, Eggs, and Thou ...

I've been thinking a lot lately about cake. Mmmm ... I love cake. Or, more accurately, I love icing, for which cake is an excellent vehicle. However, traditional wedding cakes start at around $2.50 a person for a basic cake (meaning at least $350 for a cake) and I just think that's a lot! I know many people these days have just a tiny "wedding" cake and supplement with a sheet cake, but I really don't want to do that either ... enter ideas!!

One thought we had from early on is to do wedding cupcakes! Last weekend we visited a local bakery that specialized in cupcakes, The Flying Cupcake. They have amazing cupcakes in a wide variety of flavors. We bought four to sample: the Here Comes the Bride (almond flavoring in the cake and almond buttercream icing), the Chocolate Ganache (omg, fudgy and rich), a Key Lime (apparently an experiment, new to the menu, with mereinge icing), and the Razzmatazz (raspberry filled chocolate cupcake with raspberry buttercream icing.) All of these were AWESOME and we love that we could have multiple flavors to offer, however this option is not really all that much cheaper than a regular wedding cake. Cupcakes are $2 each when ordered in dozen increments, plus an additional $.50 per filled cupcake and lots of other tacked on fees if one wants them decorated in any particular way other than standard. And while we were there we mentioned the wedding idea and the clerk told us that they do lots of weddings, in fact they had done 5 that weekend ... I started to wonder if cupcakes were too trendy these days ...

The other idea we have is that instead of getting a "wedding" cake in all its tiered glory we will simply get several, lovely, tasty, round cakes and set them up on stands of varying heights. We could still offer several flavors of cake (maybe even a red cake, I know a certain mom who loves it ...) and there's somewhere to put a topper. Based on my calculations we will need one 12" cake, two 10" cakes, two 8" cakes and, one 6" cake ... a lot of cake, about half the cost of a wedding cake! I really think this is an elegant idea.

Which cake style will claim victory over our hearts? You'll just have to wait a few months to find out. As for the debate between fondant and buttercream, there is simply no contest in my book. Buttercream wins the day!!

Have you been to any weddings where the cake was non-traditional? (And are you craving cake as much as I am now?)