Hello all! As many of your know, the Cris and The Boy Wedding calendar is ticking down and we’ve gotten to the point where we actually have to start deciding things and putting down deposits. First up (after choosing my photographer)? Finding a cake vendor. Remember back when I talked all about how I was delegating specific parts of my wedding right of the bat? Well, I forgot to mention that the cake was one of those items.
See, I’m a DIY nut. I am firmly convinced that I can always DIY anything and was all hot and heavy to do the décor and the cake and the flowers for the whole wedding. The Boy gave me a serious reality check on that one. Basically, he said, “You can't do everything. So pick one: flowers or cake. Pick one and do that one and we’ll hire out the other.” I agreed with him and decided to have a pro do the cake since I’ve actually done the flowers for a wedding before.
Which brings us to today’s post – a couple of weeks ago we participated in our first cake tasting with a potential vendor. We swung through Austin and stopped off at the Blue Note Bakery to have our meeting with Angie (the owner and head baker). You can read more about that experience here – and it was a GREAT experience, y'all! Unfortunately, our second cake tasting…not as great of an exprience.
I discovered this vendor (I’m not going to use their name because, though we did not like them, someone else might) at the San Antonio Bridal Show. They were literally the only cake vendor there with cakes that didn’t look like something out of the 80’s and that actually tasted good. Apparently, in the world of cake vendors – those two things are not a good pairing?!?! The Boy had a few days off last April so we scheduled our tasting. On the day of, we showed up for our tasting and…well, were less than impressed.
See, before we arrived at our tasting, I had already spoken with the vendor on the phone about 2-3 times. She was super pleasant and asked me all the normal questions (our names, the venue, the wedding date, etc.). During each of these conversations, the vendor expressed to me several times the importance of visiting their website and selecting our cake/filling/frosting flavors. She also sent me a confirmation letter in the mail which also stated that it was really important that we did this before our tasting.
That’s cool – we had already done that drill with our first cake tasting and had learned that it was standard for cake vendors (because it allows them to have your flavors trayed and ready to go when you arrive [it also helps them not serve you things that you don’t like or are allergic to]). So, we went to the website and we made our selections.
However, when we got there, they were totally not ready for us (this was an afternoon tasting so I have no clue why they didn’t have it all together and ready to go). We had to wait to be taken to a room, where we waited for our consultant, who made us wait while she grabbed all her stuff, and then we waited while she made us flip through endless portfolios (many of which had not been updated since the 1980’s!). I tried to show her a few images that I had torn from wedding magazines but she really pushed us to choose something from their books. I ended up doing that just to have something to use to determine what the cost of a traditional wedding cake would be. That bothered me.
It also bothered me that we our consultant left to get our cake/filling/flavors offerings – it took her 23 minutes to come back! For reals, I timed it. The first 10 minutes were a little annoying but no biggie – we chatted, texted, and flipped through the portfolios again. But the remaining 13 minutes? That’s when we got super bored and started messing around with the display cabinets (hey, don’t leave The Boy alone with a locked cabinet with a tiara inside unless you want him to try it on) and the Styrofoam cake samples. My question was – why in THE HELL did we have to wait that long? Didn’t you tell me repeatedly that I needed to pre-select them before my appointment? Did you look at those notes before my appointment (or during the first half hour I was there flipping through lookbooks) and just decide not to prep the tray? WHY DID WE HAVE TO WAIT SO LONG (and P.S. with no apology for how long it took). Color the Boy and I unimpressed.
This cake tasting was nice but not the professional and personalized experience that we had hoped for. The cake and fillings and frostings tasted AMAZING – seriously… but we really thought that we could have been treated a little better. And not like we were taking up their precious time and talent.
Have any of you done your cake vendor tastings yet? What was your experience? What questions did you ask and concerns did you address? Let us know in the comments!
Leave a Reply