Our At-Home Cake Tasting

One thing people frequently told us after we got engaged was that the only perk of wedding planning is the free cake tastings.  Personally, I think there have actually been a lot of perks (like, for instance, blogging for all of you!).  But I do love me some cake, so I was looking forward to that perk in particular.  There was a wrench in that plan, though.  We wanted to save money in the wedding cake department, which is why we opted to go with a dessert buffet rather than a traditional multi-tiered wedding cake.  We wanted the center cake on the display to be a small, "top tier"-esque cake.  Just enough so that we could have the fancy wedding cake experience without actually having a full-on multi-tier cake.

{like one of these side cakes}

cake by Cater It Simple, image via the Cater It Simple Flickr page

cake by For the Love of Cake; image via their Flickr page

Well what we found out is that when you want to have a really small, really cheap fancy wedding cake then places don't readily offer free tastings.  We considered skipping the tasting experience altogether, but we just couldn't shake the feeling that $100 was still a lot of money to spend on a cake that we'd have no idea what it was going to taste like.

Luckily, after many an email, we found a woman who offered to prepare a $12 "tasting box" for us that we could try on our own prior to ordering with her.  And that, my friends, is how we ended up doing our cake tasting on our living room couch.

As you can tell from the picture, we were so excited to dig in that we were halfway through with the flavors before I remembered to pull out my camera. In case you were curious our flavor options were red velvet, salted caramel and toffee, citrus, vanilla and fresh strawberries, devil's food with mocha, chocolate with coconut and ganache, and chocolate with rasberry jam and fudge.

I'm so very glad that we got to do this tasting because we ended up with a flavor that we never would've chosen otherwise.  If we'd had to pick off a list, I would've preferred to go with something safe that I could be sure we'd both like.  Maybe the vanilla and fresh strawberries, because anything more exotic would have been too big a risk.  But because we got to do our at-home tasting, we learned that the unusual-sounding salted caramel with toffee is delicious!  I absolutely cannot wait to see how our little skyline cake will turn out, and how it will look surrounded by all of our other desserts and topped with our custom cake topper (which I will totally show you once I have it).

Moral of the story: if something is important to you (like a tasting), don't be afraid to keep asking (politely, of course) if you're not initially able to find what you're looking for.  Hopefully it will only take you a few tries before someone says yes.

Has there been anything you've had to ask for because it wasn't offered at first?  Were you eventually successful?