Faker Baker: My Wedding Cake Disaster
I think I'm Finally Ready to Forgive...
Here’s an oldie but goodie post from my past about my wedding cake disaster. Since June is a popular month for weddings, I thought perhaps some brides-to-be might benefit from this timeless wisdom.
I married late in life. Throughout my 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s I mostly pursued my passions of police work, tracking crooks with my bloodhounds, and tracking down lost pets. I sifted through occasional boyfriends until, at the age of 52, I finally met Johnny, the man that God had set aside just for me.
Neither of us had money. Johnny was disabled after a fall in a construction accident years prior to our meeting. And I was the founder of a struggling nonprofit organization that barely paid my bills. But we trusted God and after the proposal, I got to work planning our November 30th wedding.
My dream location for a wedding was Shaver Lake, a beautiful community located high in the Sierra Nevada mountains above Fresno, California. Spending summers camping at Shaver Lake is how I grew to love both the mountains and fishing, especially fishing with my dad before his untimely death in 1977. Unfortunately, Shaver Lake is typically under several feet of snow in late November so that location was out. Instead, all that we could afford was renting out a rustic senior center (every girls dream, right?) in the town where I lived, just outside of Seattle, Washington.
Since I couldn’t hold a summer wedding outdoors on the warm, sandy shore of Shaver Lake, my plan was to transform the knotty pine interior of the senior center into a forest. We decorated it with several Christmas trees and strung many strands of white, twinkling lights throughout the large room. This gave the impression that you were inside of a cabin in the woods. The table decorations consisted of heart shaped glass bowls (from the Dollar Store) with fake, battery powered candles (also from the Dollar Store) set in tiny river rocks and set upon pine branches.
I set aside my reservations about my slim budget and the geriatric wedding venue and instead focused on the items that I was excited about, the foremost being my wedding cake.
When I first saw the online photograph of a Martha Stewart winter wedding cake, I just knew that it was the cake of my dreams! It matched the forest theme of my wedding. It gave off a soft, winter vibe. It was elegant. It looked like a winter wonderland blue, icy sugar with chocolate accents and included pine cones. The cake was described as an “ice blue creation dressed perfectly for winter with sugar dusted pine cones and dark chocolate pine needles.” I had to have it. I was so excited!
Every bride will tell you just how critically important the appearance of the wedding cake is. It is imperative that the bride sends the right message to the guests with the cake, especially when the wedding decor and venue reek of poverty. But there was one big problem. I just could not afford to pay a real baker at one of those elegant bakeries that most brides use. Instead, I found a killer wedding cake price at the bakery inside of my local Safeway grocery store.
WEDDING CAKES 101
In a blog titled Surprising Wedding Cake Facts and Traditions by Malarkey Cakes, we are told this:
“The wedding cake symbolized prosperity.”
Because of my scrimp-n-save decor, I wanted—no, I needed—my wedding cake to shout, “prosperity! prosperity!” No bride wants her wedding to look cheap. The Malarkey Cakes blog also shared details about the most expensive cake ever created:
“The most expensive cake ever!” The most expensive wedding cake ever commissioned cost $30 million! The cake was made by Buddy Valastro (better known as Cake Boss from the famed TLC cake show) at the request of NYC socialite Devorah Rose for her diamond gala event. According to reports, $30 million worth of jewels — including sapphires, emeralds, rubies and diamonds — adorned the cake. So, not really the cost of the wedding cake as much as just forking out $30 million on jewelry.
Yeah, because who doesn’t want to poop out a few rubies after your gala event, right? This same blog by Malarkey Cakes also pointed out a unique tradition:
“The Romans would break cake over the bride’s head.” Like many wedding traditions, the history of the wedding cake goes back to ancient Rome. The Romans would finish the ceremony by breaking a cake of wheat or barley over the bride’s head, which symbolized good luck.
Although this did not take place during our reception, I did entertain the thought of delivering a large hunk of my cake and breaking it over the head of the baker. However, I didn’t want to spend my honeymoon sitting in a jail cell and Johnny kept saying to me, “Just let it gooooo!” which, I might add, he has repeated every year on our wedding anniversary as I relive this nightmare part of our wedding.
The same blog said this about cake toppers:
“Cake toppers represent togetherness.”
Yet my “cake toppers” represented something altogether different from “togetherness” — they represented something from a horror movie! My supposed “sugar dusted pine cones” were not even recognizable as pinecones. They looked like they had been dunked, not dusted, in a bucket of white icing. The globs of white on the bottom level of my cake bore an eerie resemblance to the white, chalk-like dog turds that I’ve picked up after my dogs overdosed on too much calcium after chewing a bone too long (every dog owner will understand this analogy). What were supposed to be elegant, dainty, and thin “dark chocolate pine needles” toppers looked like nothing like pine needles. Instead, they looked like creepy, bloated spider legs. And instead of the smooth, even, and icy texture seen on the Martha Stewart cake, my cake had pock marks and pitting on all three layers. And the fat, fudge ripples—something that were not even in the Martha Stewart cake photo—added to the tackiness of my Safeway cake.
To read the rest of my cake story and to out how I finally got over my disappointment (not really, but I feel like my husband wants me to say this) and to see a photograph of my disaster cake, subscribe now. Just $5.00 a month, that’s it. Subscribe and you’ll be supporting my writing, funding my dream to launch Pet Memorial Retreats in 2026, and showing that you believe in my crazy dream to build an amazing Pet Memorial Site!