Details: The Cake

Posted Monday, July 28, 2008 8:57 PM

Hello again!

Things have finally calmed down and I now have the time to be able to share all the details with you. I've decided to start with one of my favorite parts of our wedding... the cakes!

These really did have a lot of meaning to us. I surprised Anthony with a Groom's cake. He had absolutely no clue what I had up my sleeve and it was a really hard secret for me to keep. We will often times tease each other about the surprises we have for one another, but I really didn't want to risk that he might guess this surprise and ruin it. It's one thing when I'm surprising him with a new video game, it's another when it was something he thought we had absolutely no room in the budget for. Ultimately I clumped his cake in with all the "presents" or "surprises" I had for him on the wedding day.

Anthony is a HUGE gamer, so it was a no brainer for me to get a Groom's cake shaped like an Xbox 360. I took several pictures of his Xbox at home, as well as an image I found online that even included dimensions of the system, and took it to our baker. Anthony has one of the Halo 3 Xbox 360 systems, it's probably the ugliest shade of army green you've ever seen. I made sure the ladies at the bakery understood that I did not want the cake in that ugly green, but instead wanted it in the typical white the standard system comes in. In the end, I think they did a fantastic job on his cake. Don't you?

So now for the other cake. This is the one that had a lot of meaning to us. In about March of 2007, I was telling my coworker about my father's wood carving hobby. I even brought in a few of his minature bird pins to show her just a small bit of his talent. She was amazed (as we all are!) by his work. That's when she had the most brilliant idea! "You should have your dad make a topper for your cake!" My jaw dropped.... why didn't I think of that?! I'm 26 years old at the time and my dad has been carving song birds since I was about 12. Surely I could have put that together at some point. Right? Uhhh yeah, probably not.

So that night I went home and brought the idea up to Anthony. I think he thought it was a bit odd at first, but then we started talking about how meaningful it would be, that we'd get to keep our cake topper for a very, very long time, and possibly pass it along to our children. This appealed to him since he was already planning on getting a glass cabinet to put some of our wedding items on display in after the wedding. He pretty much agreed anyway because while he still had opinions and ideas for wedding stuff, for the most part he always seemed to rather just go with whatever idea I came up with (more like stole from the knot). After talking about it for a while, we thought asking him to do a pair of Cardinals would be cool since they're in our wedding colors and they wouldn't look completely lost since song birds didn't necessarily fit into the stripes and modern sort of look we'd been using on all our plans at that point. We decided to ask my dad and see what he thought of the idea.

It was perfect timing, my dad doesn't like working with big deadlines, because it takes the fun out of his hobby and makes it stressful. At this point we had about 14 months before the wedding. Plenty of time for him to work on it without any cause for stress. When we asked him, he was a bit hesitant, it wasn't because he didn't want to do it. He wasn't sure he could do it. How was it going to stay on the cake? Would it be too heavy? How on earth was he going to design the birds? Ultimately he agreed, and eventually he got really excited about the carving.

Summer 2007 was when he had planned to get the carving started and finished. Actually he had hoped to send it home with us when Anthony and I visited them in September 2007. Unfortunately, my dad had a bought with carpal tunnel and had to give up carving for a while. By the time we arrived, the birds were just taking a very rough shape from the blocks of wood the started out as. As time drew nearer and nearer to the wedding date, he had to start working more and more on the birds. My mom once said to me "I hope you understand your father is working 6 hours a day on his carving!" Ouch.. I felt bad. I know that's a long time for my dad to be carving. Usually he probably spent a max of 3 hours carving each day, and even then it wasn't every day of the week. This was 7 days a week so he could get it done before my parents had to leave to head out for the wedding. A week or two later my dad says to me "I'm really happy with this carving. In fact, I just told your mother, if this carving were for any other person, I'd be keeping it!" Oh boy, was I getting excited. My mom's words of praise of the carving over the phone started bringing me to tears when ever we talked about it.

Anthony and I didn't get to see the carving until a few days before the wedding when we met with the baker so she could see what she was working with and check colors since both she and my dad were using cherry blossoms. She wanted everything to match perfect. God she's great!

I think I've talked the cake up enough and now it's time to shut up and share the pictures. I still smile every time I look at these photos. I'm so totally in love with our cake and especially our cake topper.

The birds up close, the flowers beneath them were also carved by my dad. The flowers all together make one block of wood, and each of the birds are another block of wood.

The cake tables at the reception.

Cutting the cake.

This is a good up close shot of the flowers on the cake, you can also see the photo book we had sitting on the cake table that showed pictures of the carving in the various stages of being created.