The Wedding Thread

I figured this could fit under Food and Lifestyle.

Talk about your wedding or weddings you have attended. Are you getting married this year? What's on your menu? Been married awhile? Make fun of your '80s big hair, your mother-in-law's tacky dress and/or the pastel ruffled tux shirts and stupid bridesmaid dresses. What was the coolest wedding or the worst wedding disaster you've ever seen? Ask for planning advice. Talk about your cake, catering issues, anything and everything to do with weddings!

Feel free to post pictures!

Ooo! Can't wait for some good wedding stories.

My wedding was in '86. The pictures are sooo dated. Big puffy sleeves, a hat with a veil attached etc. Even the cake looks dated. Beware brides of today! People will be able to look back and say what decade you were wed in just by the pics! :)

This is going to sound kind of weird, but it was an idea we used for my wedding and have used for many other weddings and anniversaries since. It saves tons of money and worked great.

So...I wanted a wedding cake that was all fondant with strings of pearls, etc. on it. And my mom knows how to make cakes and has made many wedding cakes for friends and family in the past, so she was going to make my cake. But we got so busy at the last minute with handling all of the other wedding stuff, I told her, 'why don't you just make a fake cake? Out of styrofoam - drape the fondant over that? It will allow you to work on it here and there and we'll just pre-cut sheet cakes to guests at the wedding - no one will even know the difference'
So, we did! We got some styrofoam shaped like cake rounds and draped fondant on them. We decorated it with strings of pearls and other stuff. It looked really elegant and beautful.
My cousin got married a few months after us - they used the same cake at their wedding! LOL! And my mom put it away in storage and kind of forgot about it, and then dug it out a year later when my aunt and uncle were having their 50th wedding anniversary party. She was shocked when she saw that, even after enduring a cold, MN winter in a shed, in was in perfect condition. She took it out and used it for that party, just put a golden 50 on the top instead of a bride and groom. It's the cake that keeps on giving, and it's over 4 years old at this point! We made another one since to use for parties. It saves us tons of money and time - wedding cakes are expensive - but no one ever guessed it wasn't real. And when it comes time to serve the cake - no one is paying any attention to where their piece of cake is coming from. We'd wheel the cake away and people just assumed it was being cut up and served, not knowing we were giving them a piece of sheet cake (which is really cheap - you can buy large sheet cakes at costco).

I think there are some places that rent out fake cakes for weddings now. I see that it's more popular in Canada than in the US, but it's catching on. I'll see if I can find a pic of my cake and post it...

Here's the only pic I could find of the cake. See that little cake next to the big cake? That is a real cake that we used for the cake cutting ritual part of the reception.

ETA: Gah, my pic is so small. You can barely see the cake. Sorry about that!

It's funny that I should run across a wedding thread after the conversation I had last weekend. My sons girlfriend asked me if I'd buy her a wedding cake. I just know I had that deer in the headlights look. My sons divorce was just final in July and he and this girl have only been together for a short time. I know how he feels about getting married again, so I was literally dumbfounded. I said, "why? you getting married?" with a strained grin on my face. She laughed and said, "Heck, no, I just love the taste of wedding cake!" And she pointed across the street to a bakery that had one displayed. I think she did it at my expense too because she sure laughed at me!! :teeth

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Originally Posted by livin4reality;3192484;

Ooo! Can't wait for some good wedding stories.

My wedding was in '86. The pictures are sooo dated. Big puffy sleeves, a hat with a veil attached etc. Even the cake looks dated. Beware brides of today! People will be able to look back and say what decade you were wed in just by the pics! :)

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I got married in 1981. I didn't have a hat, but the brown tuxes with the peach ruffled shirts give away the decade. :lol

My mom made my wedding cake. She did it as a hobby but she did a beautiful job. I've got pictures but I'll have to dig them out and scan them.

This is a funny side story - I spent the weekend with a group of my classmates from nursing school. One of them had brought a scrapbook of all of our weddings she had attended, and when I was looking at my pages I noticed that she had mints from my reception wrapped in plastic wrap, taped in her scrapbook. Remember, I said I got married in 1981. Later that night she had placed all the pictures and everything in envelopes and gave them to us, so I opened mine, and there were the 27 year old fossilized mints. :rofl Needless to say they went straight in the garbage as soon as I got home.

I got married in 89. Big hair, big shoulder pads and those batwing dolman sleeves on the dress. I had a cake with fondant which was NEW back then. No one had seen one before and we had chocolate cake and everyone in the reception said: "It's Chocolate" when we cut it. Now everyone has different kind of cake, but back then, it wasn't as trendy as it is now to have something besides white cake.

Onei I think that your mom has found a great answer to the cake thing. A resuable cake. It's perfect. I have actually been to a wedding where there was a VERY small wedding type cake that the bride and groom cut and they then served the guest sheet cakes that had been precut in the kitchen. Thought it was a GREAT idea. Wedding cakes are SO expensive.

Yeah, they really are expensive, and SO much can go wrong with a real cake, too - if the wedding is outside, and it's really hot it can melt, or it can get bumped by a drunken guest, or who knows? At the last wedding I attended, a friend of the groom brought his dog, and it ATE the cake when no one was watching it (it was an outdoor wedding). My best friend, who was the bride, had a good sense of humor about it and got a good pic of the dog asleep next to the half eaten cake that was splattered on the floor next to him.

We were thinking of starting up a business and had a name and everything - Faux Gasteau (sp? means 'fake cake' in French - my daugher is the Frenchie, not me!). but we were both too busy to go that route. It would be a good business idea, though!

My friend's sister had cupcakes instead of a cake. I thought that was a genius idea-- in my admittedly minimal history of wedding attendance, the huge cakes never taste as good as you want them to, usually they're on the dry side, etc. I also like the fake cake idea. I will have a good cake when (if?) I get married.

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Originally Posted by onei0091;3192491;

Here's the only pic I could find of the cake. See that little cake next to the big cake? That is a real cake that we used for the cake cutting ritual part of the reception.

ETA: Gah, my pic is so small. You can barely see the cake. Sorry about that!

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That really is a beautiful cake - she did a great job! White wedding cake often tastes kind of stale and not very exciting anyway.