Congratulations! You’ve arrived at the second best part of wedding planning, the cake! I only say second, as I’m not quite sure anything else can beat wedding dress shopping. Nevertheless, the wedding cake consultation is definitely one of the highlights of wedding planning, and something that the both of you can enjoy together.
It’s also something that most couples decide to focus on once the larger matters have already been decided. By now, your wedding date should be firmly in the diary, the wedding venue booked, and you may have selected your colour scheme already. Though there are still so many decisions to be made when it comes to the wedding cake, hopefully these are fun decisions. In comparison with whether you need to invite your great Auntie Lola, choosing whether or not the top tier is lemon or pistachio doesn’t seem as daunting!
What is a Wedding Cake Consultation?
A wedding cake consultation is an exploratory meeting between you and your wedding cake designer. Naturally, it involves the tasting of cake – (yum), and then a deep dive into the details of your wedding so that the wedding cake design process can begin. Here at Sugar & Stories, the consultation is conducted in two parts – the cake tasting, followed by the design meeting.
Wedding Cake Samples
As already mentioned, all wedding cake consultations should include tasting some cake! Your wedding cake will probably be the most expensive, most important and the largest cake you’ll ever order, so it’s only proper you taste a range of flavours first. Once you have checked my availability and I am free for your wedding date, the next step would be to order a sample box. My sample boxes contain two decadent slices of four flavours of your choice from my flavour menu.
The beauty of these sample boxes is that they are available for you to enjoy in the comfort of your own home at the most convenient time for you. It also ensures that none of the cake goes to waste. My sample boxes are packaged so that they can be carefully repackaged and enjoyed at your leisure. It’s also a very nice way to enjoy the cakes in privacy or with some family members. You can share your thoughts on the flavours in a non time pressured environment, and it’s a lovely way to spend an evening after work! Either way, there is a lot of flexibility and choice with postal wedding cake samples.
Sample boxes are £40 to purchase and are sent by Royal Mail Special Delivery.
How to Prepare for Wedding Cake Sampling
It may be strange to think of tasting wedding cake flavours as something to prepare for, but here are a few tips!
- Think about whether you will be keeping the top tier to enjoy for your first anniversary
- Think about whether your favourite flavours are popular, this will impact whether you include them as the smallest tier for just the two of you or not
- Consider your guests and the flavours they may enjoy before selecting your sample box flavours
- Consider any allergies that you or your guests may have and how severe they are
- Before tasting your cakes, clear at least an hour and a half to dedicate time to tasting, discussing and noting down your thoughts
- Make sure you are not sampling the cakes after a strong tasting meal/drink – this will impact the taste
Wedding Cake Design Consultation
Part two of the wedding cake consultation is all about the design. After you’ve tasted your flavours and decided that they are delicious, we schedule in a Zoom meeting. This is one of my favourite parts of the process. Here, we get to “e-meet”, and put a face to all the preceding emails!
This Zoom call marks the beginning of the design phase, and this is where the magic truly begins. Here I find out more about you as a couple, your wedding day hopes, and your expectations for your cake. Beforehand, I usually set some “homework” (the fun kind), which gives me all the visual inspiration for your wedding day. We will consider your wedding ambience, your colour scheme, the other wedding vendors and more. After this meeting, depending on your design preferences, I will put together a couple of digital sketches for you to choose from.
How to Prepare for the Cake Design Consultation
- Send your Pinterest board to your cake designer, there will be little nuggets there that are easy to miss in conversation
- If you want a truly bespoke cake, I think it’s nice to look at other cakes initially, but once you’ve honed in on the style you’re after, I think it’s best to discard them after sharing them with your cake designer
- Come with an open mind! Your cake designer will have some ideas that you may not have thought of – the best designs are born when you just let your cake designer work their magic
- Prepare yourself to have fun! Cake consultations are one of the least stressful things about wedding planning – enjoy all of it.
Story Time
From the outset of this business, I’ve thought carefully about how I conduct the wedding cake consultations, as I want them to be an utterly lovely experience. The reason it matters so much is because when Rob and I were getting married, we didn’t get this.
We planned our wedding within four months. Our wedding cake was a very kind gift, so we booked our consultation three weeks before our wedding to choose our flavours.
Our first meeting was cancelled due to a large order they had, so we rearranged to go the consecutive week. We were excitedly looking forward to tasting our cake samples, and eagerly attended our in person cake tasting. When we got there, they had forgotten we were coming. Hurriedly they sat us down, and asked us to remind them what our cake flavours were. Because they had forgotten we were coming, they simply whipped out the flavours they had in the freezer. They had three out of the four flavours we wanted to try, great! Our host defrosted the cakes in the microwave and handed us warmed up sponges with melting buttercream in the middle. They promised to send the missing flavour, but of course that didn’t arrive.
Needless to say, that for us, this wasn’t a good experience, and if time had allowed, we would have selected another cake maker.
I want better than that for you. I have lovingly crafted a wedding cake tasting experience for you that is enjoyable at each turn. If you would like to book a wedding cake consultation, please fill out the form below. Let’s get to this exciting stage!
Until next time.
Jasmine