Wedding Cake

I truly am not a huge fan of wedding cake.  Usually it’s fairly bland cake topped with way too much too-sweet frosting.  And the whipped kind is nasty, people.  Buttercream is the only way to go (chocolate buttercream works too, since it’s still buttercream).  But I’m pretty sure some people don’t use real butter or real cream when they make it & Crisco just doesn’t taste good either. 

My brother’s wedding is coming up very, very soon.  And I’m excited for them.  I know that picking out the cake was kind of an ordeal for them, too.  And probably expensive.  Which is ridiculous to me since the ingredients for cake are probably the cheapest things around.  But I guess if you know how to make those ingredients look incredibly pretty, you get paid the big bucks for it.  And sometimes people that know how to make cakes look pretty also know how to make them taste good, but I find that’s rarely the case, sadly.  Again, note the blandness or too-sweetness that just masks the lack of any real flavor or texture.

There are cakes I like, make no mistake.  I recently did a whole post about my friend Lisa’s Darn Good Chocolate Cake.  And a bakery in Grinnell, Iowa, makes amazing Pink Champagne cakes & cupcakes and will even make it in sheetcake form, which my sister did for her wedding.  (The cake is a pink sponge cake, filled with a creamy pudding filling & topped with a light pink frosting.  Yum!)  But most cakes just don’t do it for me.  So I’m a fan of the new-ish trend of selecting something other than cake to celebrate your nuptials.  Some people have had donuts, some have had brownie ice cream sundaes, some have had cookies, some have had root beer floats.  I think this is all due to the fact that the wedding cake industry has become a bit overblown price-wise and a bit underwhelming taste-wise.  I know that cake decorating shows are all the rage now, so I should be impressed rather than depressed.  But I just can’t jump on the bandwagon, for some reason.  I have yet to taste a wedding cake that blows my mind.  Fun fillings sure help, though I’m not that big of a fan of fruit jam products, which are usually the “impressive” filling. 

That said, I am a fan of cupcakes.  For some reason, I think cake usually tastes better in cupcake-form.  Maybe because the paper cup keeps moisture in better and the frosting is more proportionate?  I don’t know, but I do know that some couples have chosen cupcakes as a substitute for wedding cake now too, and I usually applaud that as well. 

I hope my brother’s cake is everything they want it to be.  I hope they didn’t have to pay an arm & a leg for it.  (I should have appreciated my mom more for making my cake & having a lady in our church decorate it!!)  And I hope they don’t freeze the top of theirs for a year, let it sit in their fridge for a week after their first anniversary, and then throw it out without tasting it because it just sounds nasty to eat a year old frozen cake.  (I do appreciate that my mother carefully froze it for us & purchased a cake carrier for us so she could keep hers but still bring us our cake nice & neatly.  I never, ever told her we didn’t eat it.)