The Cake

I never would have thought choosing a wedding cake would be so difficult. But making a decision about the cake has been a tremendous source of stress for me. I said I wasn't going to let it stress me out. I said if worst comes to worst, I would go to Food Lion to get a premade sheet cake before I let it get to me. But I'll admit, not having the cake ready to go was getting to me. Here's how the cake drama has unfolded.

At first, I was going to have my sister make cupcakes for us. I had a vision of making marble cupcakes with a mixture of coffee flavored cake and white chocolate flavored cake. I wanted them iced simply with a cream cheese frosting. Then I wanted crushed oreos on top so it would look like dirt. Before decoration, I imagined it would look like this (just imagine it without the gummy worms).

I had planned to decorate them very simply by just adding some chocolate rocks to the top of the cupcake.

They look so realistic.

The more I thought about these cupcakes, the more I didn't want to do it. Cupcakes have become the cliched wedding cake these days, and I really just didn't want to fall into the cupcake trap.

So, I started thinking about our rock theme, and I did a search online to see if anyone has made cairn cakes. What better way to represent our theme then with little cakes that look like cairns. It would still have the same individualized feel as the cupcakes, but with a little more uniqueness. I found this cool cairn cake someone had made, and it looked like exactly what I was thinking.

So, I sent the link to my sister and asked if she thought she could do the cakes like this. But of course, it wasn't enough for me to ask if she could decorate it. I also had a specific type of cake in mind. I found a recipe for something call rock cakes, which is apparently some British thing. So, I sent it to Jennifer and asked if she could make the cairn cakes using the rock cake recipe. She thought she would be able to.

I made a batch of these rock cakes myself. They are pretty much just sweet biscuits. At the time, I was fine with that. But then I just started thinking about the whole cake thing and getting frustrated all over again. I nixed this new cairn rock cake idea and let Jennifer off the hook as my baker.

So, my next thought was that instead of cake, perhaps we should have some other sort of dessert. Cliff is a cookie monster, so we thought of making no bake cookies since they have kind of a rocky essence to them.

I wanted to make two different kinds: a nutella cookie and a white chocolate cookie. Our idea was to have the nutella cookie be the base of a mountain while the white chocolate cookie would be on top and look like the snow-capped peaks. It was a great idea. But after I made my batch of white chocolate macademia peanut butter cookies, I immediately disregarded it. What was I thinking? I'm not really a fan of those types of cookies.

So, it was back to square one. In a fit of frustration, I started thinking that the sheet cake idea was sounding pretty good. But I knew I could get it from somewhere besides Food Lion. Cliff and I brainstormed on this idea for a couple of days. I actually scheduled a plain marble cake with a bakery in Asheville before Cliff came up with a brilliant idea, realized with the help of one of his coworkers.

We had wedding favors printed with the caricature I purchased for Cliff last year for our anniversary.

So, Cliff's coworker, Debbie, suggested that we also include our caricature on our wedding cake. Thus, the design seed was planted in Cliff's head. Improving on the caricature, Cliff added mountains, sky and the sun in the background. Then, to incorporate our theme as well as our upcoming tattoos, Cliff came up with a concept for the cake. Finally, since we had already purchased some candy rocks for a previous cake idea, we decided we could decorate around the cake with the rocks. Here is the concept Cliff designed for the cake creators.

So, now that we finally had the concept, we had to find the location that would make our cake. That begs the question of do we have it made in Asheville or should we have it made locally and transport the cake? We opted to have it made locally so that we could go visit the shop and explain our vision. We found a place in Cary that did photo printing for cakes and had some nice looking designs on their website. So, on March 30, we stopped by Simply Cakes to place our order and explain our vision.

After a week of nervous anticipation, our cake was ready. We left town for Asheville today, April 6. We picked up our cake on our way out of the area. I was so excited to see how well the bakery had interpreted Cliff's concept. They did a fabulous job.

Our picture looks like a rip out in rock, similar to how our tattoos will look like The Thing's rock skin rip out in our own skin. So far, I give two thumbs up for Simply Cakes based on design. I'll have wait until Tuesday to see how the cake tastes. We opted for a marble cake with almond and double chocolate and a buttercream icing. I can't wait to try it out.