Theme vs. Design Scheme

Despite what your 3rd Grade english teacher may have told you, "Theme" is a four letter word.

I can't tell you how many times I hear a bride and groom talk down their own fabulous ideas for their wedding celebration because they are worried that it is too "themey".  In general, I agree.  Themes are great for kid's birthday parties, hell, even adult birthday parties, but you'll never catch me endorsing a "My Little Pony" or "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle" themed wedding.  Well, at least not yet.

Let's make a critical differentiation, shall we?  Yep, a theme can be tacky, trendy, and otherwise distracting from the celebration of two people committing to spend the rest of their lives together.  But a Design Scheme...hints of personality running throughout your event, sharing with your guests your story, your favorite things, what makes you love each other so, actually adds to any wedding.

Now, onto Carrie and Nick.

When I met with Carrie and Nick, they were excited to be getting married, but the planning process had fallen a bit flat.  Within a few minutes, I heard about Nick's proposal at the State Fair, and how he'd like to integrate a Griffin (his family name, and a really cool-looking mythical creature found in many heraldic crests) into the stationery somehow.  They wanted to keep a classic look to the wedding in all elements, but also wanted their guests to cut loose and have a good time.  For favours, they absolutely required Sweet Martha's cookies...their very favorite tradition at the Fair (I'd like to meet someone who hasn't walked around with one of those buckets of cookies at least once). 

So, how do you incorporate the fun, casual, even somewhat bumpkin (yes, people, there is a Swine Barn) aspects of The Great Minnesota Get Together, with an elegant formal country club wedding?

Easy.  As they were talking, I could see them working it through.  While the Griffin that Nick pulled up on his smart phone is one ugly creature (Sorry Nick), the Heraldic Crest for the Griffin Family that he pulled up a few minutes later was beautiful.  But more importantly, it reminded us of a vintage carnival logo...you know, the kind of thing you'd see painted on the side of the traveling circus trains.  We just incorporate the crest with a circus stripe background pattern, keep everything in their beautiful color scheme of pale blue and slate grey, and run with it. 

And run with it, they did!!  By the time they left, we had decided to name the guest tables (rather than number them) after different rides at the fair.  Carrie had a photo of place cards shaped like tickets that entitled each guest to a seat "on the tilt-a-whirl", "tunnel of love" etc.  She loved the concept, but the cards were solid bright colors and far too informal for their venue.  We can fix that!

And the biggest hold out of all, was that Nick wanted to do an old-fashioned ring-toss instead of letting the guests simply clink their fork against their glasses to get the bride and groom to kiss.  Sounds like he had a lot of Coke to drink in the coming months to put this all together!

For the cake, we kept it classic.  Don't forget, we're dealing with a formal event in a beautiful venue.  We copied the bride's lace pattern from her dress, and incorporated details from her jewelry and the Griffin Crest.  Topped it with an enormous Gum Paste Dahlia and called it done (until a few weeks later, when they emailed to tell me that their Doberman Pinscher, Capone really wanted to be on the cake, so I sculpted him out of chocolate paste, and gave him the best seat in the house).  By the way...we miss seeing you around the shop Cappy, come by for a visit, sweet boy!

We got our hands on Sweet Martha's Cookie Dough, and baked up the little sweeties the day before the wedding.  Coupled with little pints of milk, tied with the most adorable paper straws that Carrie found, we put them out for guests to take home at the end of the night. 

Here's the best part.  What Nick and Carrie did, was to take the often daunting, stressful job of planning a wedding, and embraced it.  Each idea led to the next, and their wedding was filled with all of the things they love.  It was natural, relaxed, beautiful and fun...just like them.

Many thanks to Fine Exposures Photography for these lovely photos. And to Ambiente Wedding Coordinating and Minikahda club for taking the reigns on the wedding day and letting the Bride and Groom just enjoy themselves.  Got to love the floral, as well, so hat's off to Zinnia Designs Floral.

Love in an Elevator

Now that I've got that horrible tune in your head, I'll try to redeem myself.

This blog isn't about Aerosmith.  I just lost half of you, but that's okay.  This blog is actually about smart people.  Not your average smart people...your MIT Media Lab, Mechanical Engineer, smart people. 

Suffice it to say, that the first two line items on the groom's virtual resume are as follows: Max/MSP chiptune externals and virtual circuit bending-enabled emulators.  Template-directed bytecode instrumentation for program visualization. 

 

 'Nuff said.

Laura and Kyle met at MIT.  They both worked in the Media Lab there, where, I still have no idea what they do. I do know two things.  One, they shared their first kiss in the elevator at the Media lab, and two, Kyle proposed four years later in that same elevator.  I instantly went for the obvious...an elevator cake, but Laura reeled me back in, and pointed out that the Media Lab's elevator is nothing to write home about.  Instead, she and Kyle recommended that we use the Media Lab building as loose inspiration for the cake.  She also suggested that we make little frosting robots to top the cake.  Did I mention that I heart Laura?

As we began sketching, we copied the paneled texture of the atrium of the building, worked in the gear motif from their invitations (engineers, people) and even incorporated my first-ever cut out, overhanging cake, again, inspired by the Lab's architecture.  They suggested that the Cake-Bots be building their initials on top of the cake, as  MIT students are known for "hacks" (pranks), many of which involve building things on rooftops.

Laura even requested that her Cake-bot be holding her "favorite drill".  No kidding, she has a "favorite drill".  I'm liking this girl more and more.  When I asked her for a photo of her with the drill, she didn't have one, so she gave me the make and model of it, and sent me this little beauty of a pic instead.  It was entitled "best picture of me with a power tool". 

Now, I've recieved a ton of extranneous collateral from my clients in my day.  Photos of their pets for our frosting ASPCA doggies, photos of wedding dresses, centerpieces, and honeymood destinations, but none will ever delight me as much as this one.

With the bulk of the cake designed, we had one blank tier (by luck, or maybe subconciously by my own brute determination to share the elevator story with their guests).  So, I laid it out there once more.  With my best sales pitch, while whining a bit and bouncing up and down on my chair like a third grader who has the answer to the teacher's question, I once again suggested the elevator.  It would look like the button panel of the elevator, and we'd even carve out the cake behind the 3rd floor (Media Lab level) button. We'd put an LED light behind the number, printed on a sheet of vellum so that it lit up.  Not sure if it was my incessant nagging, or the LED light that did it, but it was a yes!

The wedding day came, and while setting up the cake, one of the Caterers asked about the meaning behind the Cake-bots.  I began to explain that the bride and groom worked in robotics, and turned to one of the bridesmaids (also from MIT) for verification.  She got as far as "well, robotics is a small part of what we do at the media lab..." before my brain shut down as though she were surely speaking another language that I will never understand. 

Suffice it to say...Smart People.

Many thanks to Shelley Paulson for the beautiful photos!!

 

50 Years Family

I recently hired a teenager to come in for the summer months and do dishes at the shop.  While I'd like to take credit for this brilliant idea, it was Jenna who suggested it.  It just so happens that she also provided the teenager...her little brother Sam.
One day at lunch, Sam took a Rubik's Cube out of his bag.  I can't believe kids still have these things.  I'll date myself here, but I remember going to the mall and buying one of these suckers the year they hit the market.  I brought it home, mixed it up, got to the point where I could solve two sides, then smashed it apart, and rebuilt it (OCD, lack of spatial skills, and rash behavior are not a good combo).  There it sat on my shelf until the next family garage sale (where I earned back 10% of my investment, because everyone else in Appleton, Wisconsin in 1980 had already learned  that  a toy that made you feel inadequate was not a fun toy).

Imagine my amazement when I watched this kid solve his in under 2 minutes!!  Needless to say, I probably punctured his eardrums with my cries of disbelief and envy...and then insisted that he teach me.

What does this have to do with Marsha and Gary, and their 50th wedding anniversary?  Trust me, we're getting there people.

It's been a couple of months.  I've learned how to solve the Rubik's Cube.  Yeah, I said it.  I may have a copy of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables on my bedside table, but I also have a copy of Christopher Moore's "The Stupidest Angel" and right between the two is my Rubik's Cube.  My best time so far is two minutes, fifteen seconds.  But there's a difference between me and Sam.  When I'm working on the Rubik's cube, it takes concentration, silence, and some pretty weird facial contortions.  Sam, wait for it...makes it look Easy.

Aha!  Enter Marsha and Gary.
They've been married for 50 years.  They were having the party to prove it.  And they made it look so incredibly easy!!

My first thought when planning our meeting was antique lace, soft pink and ivory, maybe some gold accents, but definitely not anything like I got.  As a matter of fact, within the first five minutes I told them as much.  They had a clean, modern style and sensibility.  They were incorporating gold into the color scheme, but the floral would be a riot of fuschia, orange, and bright beautiful color!  Their invitations, designed by our friends over at Amy Zaroff  Events + Design, were laid out beautifully.  The text being the main graphic design, not a doily, wedding bell, or dove in sight.

"What did you expect?  We'd be wheeled in with oxygen masks on?" was, what I believe to be the exact wording of Gary's response to my shock.

The cake designed itself.  We took the beautifully laid out date "motif" from the invitations, and decided to add other significant dates to the cake.  I suggested the date they bought their first house, had their children, took meaningful vacations, but to Gary, this was a no-brainer.  What he and Marsha had built was a marriage, and a family.  We put the birth-dates of their children on the second tier, their grandchildren on the third, and top and bottom tiers would be their wedding date, and the date of their anniversary.  Cake. Done.

With that out of the way, I spent the next half hour just getting to know Marsha and Gary, and doing what I do best...poke my nose into other people's business.  I've been married 17 years.  I want to be married 50 years, so I have something to learn from these two.  But they couldn't give me a Magic Bullet.  No simple formula like solving the Rubik's cube.  Turns out, being married, and happy together for that long isn't easy, but it's simple.  As I got to know these two over the course of planning their cake, sampling cake flavors, and the incredible encouraging messages from Marsha on our Voicemail (I saved them, and listen to them when I have a rough day, not kidding) I learned that being happily married for fifty years is no different than being happily married for seventeen, or even one year.  These two genuinely like each other.  Respect each other.  Treat each other with dignity and honor. And love each other.  Every day.

They truly make it look easy.

One more thing for me to practice.  Oh well, if I Sam can teach me that Damn Rubik's Cube, I'll rely on my experience with Gary and Marsha, and work on this.  Maybe they could write me little instructions on the back of cake sketches the way Sam did.  Or maybe, we'll just have to get together for dinner sometime.  I'd love that.

Ain't that a kick in the head?

How lucky can one guy be?

I kissed her and she kissed me

Like the fella once said,

"ain't that a kick in the head?"

I've had the pleasure of working with couples of all ages, all sorts of backgrounds, and (I thought) all professions.  I've made cakes for professional athletes, Hollywood celebrities, doctors, lawyers, prison guards, cops, paramedics, even two bona fide NASA rocket-scientists (they prefer to be called aerospace engineers, but I can't help but think the former is a far cooler title).  So when I was meeting with Elissa and her Dad to design her wedding cake, and she informed me that her groom wouldn't be sampling the cakes because he was "training".  I needed to know what on earth kind of career would limit someones cake intake!  My professional baseball and hockey player-clients have had no trouble packing in the goodies...and my NFL player-groom practically considered it a part of his training regiment!  So what exactly does this guy do that is so disciplined that he won't indulge in a little cakey goodness?

He's a UFC fighter.

The Evil Cake Genius is a lover, not a fighter.  I'd never seen a UFC fight before.   Just never had any interest...until then.  Turns out, I wouldn't have to wait long... the groom was scheduled to fight that weekend.  So, on Saturday night, I popped some corn, put on my favorite pajamas, and my husband "The Captain" and I curled up on the couch with our little dog Speck, and put on the fight. 

GRATITUDE CHECK:  Cake decorating may not be the glamourous, exciting job they depict it to be on most shows.  The work is rewarding, but downright physical at times.  There's a lot of heavy lifting, long hours on your feet, cleaning, cleaning, and more cleaning, more time than you'd ever expect is spent doing mundane office work, and when you finally produce your masterpiece, it is inevitably cut up and eaten.  But even on my worst day I can pretty much go to work with the safe assumption that no one is going to beat the living crap out of me.  Just sayin'.

Back to our lovely couple.  Nik has a great record.  He's a hell of a fighter, and we watched as he fought despite a possibly fractured orbital bone (pretty sure that's his eye socket).  I will NEVER say that my job is tough again.

A week later, Elissa called back to book the cake.  I was glad.  She's really fun to work with, and I love the design we came up with (based on her beautiful dress). 

She wanted to keep the sweet understated cake, but wanted to know how we could include the groom a little in the design. I'm glad I watched his fight, because I knew the answer immediately.  A frosting band aid.  Nothing could be more appropriate.  She agreed, and added that he is a huge fan of Star Craft.  Being more geek than athlete, I had a slightly better idea of what she was talking about (only slightly).  So we added the Protoss symbol to his band-aid (that's his race in the game). 

The wedding day came, and we set up the cake amidst all of the insane sound and lighting that any good UFC wedding reception should have (smoke cannons included).  In all of the excitement of the day, I'm sure a little frosting band-aid on the back of a wedding cake could easily go unnoticed.  That's why we were surprised and delighted to hear that the groom actually Tweeted a photo of it.  Elissa told us that she had to wait to cut the cake because he insisted on Tweeting it live.  Cake mission...accomplished.

My head keeps spinnin',

I go to sleep and keep grinnin'

If this is just the beginnin',

My life is gonna be beautiful!

 

She's tellin' me we'll be wed,

She's picked out a king-size bed

I couldn't feel any better or i'd be sick

Tell me quick oh, ain't love a kick?

Tell me quick ain't love a kick in the head?

Get me to the Reception on time

I'm late.  I'm always late...a "latepants" if you will.  Can't help it.  Any minute that I arrive early  to something is a minute that I could have been working on one of the ten-thousand other things I have on my to do list.  So, I'm either exactly on time, or late...mostly late. Except for cake deliveries.  In seventeen years of delivering cakes, I can think of two times that I ran late.  One was an unexpected traffic jam that snuck up on me, resulting in a hurried set up that caused the caterer to prolong the cocktail hour by ten minutes, the other was due to a tornado warning, in which, my husband, the Captain, had fortunately already arrived with the cake, and called me off from driving into the storm. Of course, my only question..."is the cake alright?" and my brilliant husband's response "It's on a kitchen cart in the basement of the hotel with me and the hotel staff and guests."  Apparently, it was the only inanimate object moved to safety...gotta love the Captain.

The trick to keeping Latepants from being late, is in the padding.  We arrive at each venue two hours before the guests arrive.  That gives me an hour and a half to set up the cake and take photos, and another half hour of cushion time in case the guest's arrive early, or we hit traffic, etc.

The only exception to this rule is at the Minnesota History Center.  We love it there.  Top notch staff, great food, friendly people.  The only hitch...it's a museum, therefore, open to the public until five o'clock each day.  So, when Jenna hired us for her wedding, and informed me that the guests would be arriving at 6:00, we had to throw our meticulously padded timing out the window.  Can we set up a cake in an hour.  Sure.  If we have to.

Jenna had a fabulous vintage aesthetic to her wedding.  Her sense of color is fabulous (one of my worst design traits) and her knack for personalization, amazing.  She should be a wedding planner... actually, she opened her own business this year...wedding planning.  She's great, if you need the number, give me a call!  We had a great design session, combining her and her fiance's love of travel, with their vintage look and color scheme and her vision that the cake should look like a stack of hat boxes.  I've always wanted to do a hatbox cake, and the beautiful vintage hatboxes that she found online as inspiration, made designing this little sweetie a sheer delight.  We added a band to match the waistline detail of her dress on the top tier, and the beautiful damask pattern from her hand-made table runners to another, and put lyrics from a song that she wrote for the wedding ceremony on the bottom.  Multi talented, much?  Finally, we found art from vintage post cards, and made frosting-backed travel stickers and postcards for the cakes to tell the couple's story in geography.

The day of the wedding came, we planned to arrive at the History Center at 4:30 (even though we couldn't get in until 5:00, we're persistent that way) and Jenna and I began our Caravan to the reception at 4:00, leaving 30 minutes to get from Plymouth to St. Paul.  A trip I've made more times than I can count.  Little did I know, that MNDOT had postponed the much publicized closing of I-94 from a week earlier due to rain...and didn't share this information with, well, it seems, ANYONE. 

When we got to 94, we were redirected to 94 west, and taking one look at the line of traffic trying to get back into Minneapolis on 94 east, I decided to drive through the city.  The Captain and I both went to the U of MN, and lived in Minneapolis for several years...so I called him so he could direct me to the next entrance onto 94.  Easy, we drove through downtown (which by the way, everyone else decided to do) and attempted to get onto 94 at the Metrodome, nope, that entrance was closed, Seven Corners, closed, the detour took people onto 35W North, but I'm smarter than the detour, right? Wrong.  Poor Jenna got the tour through Dinkytown, onto University Avenue, which, just out of coincidence, was not only shut down to one lane, but was covered with Fraternity and Sorority members having some kind of festival...

The idea was to get down to 280 and cut back over to 94, but with the lane closure on University, I was travelling an average of 4 miles per hour, and starting to FREAK OUT.  Finally, I remembered the entrance onto 94 that I used to take when I lived on Erie Street.  The Captain advised against the risk, but I was getting nowhere on University Avenue.  So, I made a last minute decision, and cut right, leaving Jenna to try to maneuver over.  I hung up with the Captain, and called Jenna to direct her to where I hoped we could make it onto the Highway.  And, by the grace of the cake gods, it was open.  The skies opened, and I think I heard the faint sounding of horns, as I made it onto I - 94 via the Huron entrance.  Which I had all to myself.  Nothing makes you recall every scene from every Post-Apocalyptic, and/or Zombie movie more than having Interstate 94 in Minneapolis, all to yourself.  Not a single car or construction vehicle, not a soul, besides me and my cake, from the U of MN Minneapolis campus all the way to Cretin/Vandalia.  A stretch of road that measures approximately 3 miles, and felt like 30 miles waiting for Mad Max and Tina Turner to come carry me off to Thunderdome. 

But, again, I digress.  Turns out, I arrived at the History center at 5:40, with Jenna a mere 2 minutes behind me.  We sprinted inside, found a flatbed, and set a new land-speed record for stacking a four tier wedding cake and putting all of the finishing touches on it in fifteen minutes.  I even had time to snap a few pictures of it before the guest's arrived.


Not my ideal day, but as these photos of the Bride and Groom show, no one was the wiser.  Until now...

Guitar man

My brother was the cool one.  I hate to admit it, but it's about time.  I was preppy, he was punk, I had a Yamaha scooter, he had a t-top Corvette, I played classical violin, he played guitar.  Not just guitar, not just electric guitar.  A Fender Stratocaster.  Now, I was a twelve year old nerd with coke-bottle glasses.  I didn't know cool from anything, but when I heard that name..."Fender Stratocaster"  I knew.  This wasn't an instrument.  This was the cool personified.  And it was.  And it is.

Jimi Hendrix played a Fender, so did John Lennon, Pete Townshend, and Eric Clapton to name a few.  The Edge plays one, how can you possibly deny the coolness of someone named "the Edge"...don't even try...you can't.  And most importantly, Gina's son. 

I made Gina's wedding cake several years ago.  She was not a traditional bride, as a matter of fact, a couple of months before her wedding, I made a groom's cake for her son's wedding.  He was a camera buff, so we made him a completely edible Hassleblad camera and camera bag. 

Now, her second son was tying the knot, and she had already set precedent that there would be an awesome groom's cake.  Who am I to squelch sibling rivalry?  So I sat down with Gina and her soon-to-be daughter in law Theresa...and the groom's stealthily "borrowed" Fender Stratocaster Sunburst. 

It looked familiar to me.  Not because of my brother's guitar, that was a high school kid's beat up, used, dented, scratched, and otherwise abused black Strat.  This was a high gloss, rosewood fingerboard, pristine Sunburst, the model that Buddy Holly played.  My dad was a huge Buddy Holly fan (in his high school yearbook photo he was a dead ringer for Buddy).  You didn't mention that name around him unless you were ready for a lecture about "how much talent went down in that plane".  But I'm digressing, as usual.

Typically, I don't like to make cakes that are a literal translation of anything.  I'd rather use the object at hand as inspiration for a cake, but not a direct copy.  I don't know if it was the influence of my brother and my dad, or just the sheer beauty of this guitar, but I broke all of my rules.  I CAREFULLY took the guitar out of the case, and traced it onto parchment, then proceeded to photograph it from every angle, every detail recorded, down to the fret lines.  We added frosting sheet of music for a sond that would be played at the ceremony, a bunch of frosting guitar picks, and Stewart (the groom's childhood dog) hiding under the neck, but otherwise, the goal was this.  Make a life-size replica of this guys guitar.  My two goals...make it entirely edible, and make it so realistic that the groom may try to play it.

The decorating didn't go entirely without a few panic attacks.  Turns out, the board was too flexible, and threatened to snap off the solid frosting guitar handle when the cake was moved.  So we sent Julia to our favorite cake-supply store (Lowe's) to buy steel beams to attach to the bottom of the cake board...WHILE THE CAKE WAS ON IT.  We also had one of those "couldn't have called that in a million years" cake moments, when the frosting guitar strings decided to reposition themselves into a warped hourglass formation before our very eyes.  Still haven't figured that one out...it looked as though they were attracted to one another by some kind of static electricity or magnetism...really bizarre.  But we carefully moved them back into place and attached them to their frets with a little royal icing (an hour and a half long process) shortly before delivery.  Only broke one of them in the process, good thing we made extras.

Turns out, the groom didn't play his Caketar, but it did get a lot of play at the reception.  Especially once it was cut.  We made the cake Banana Walnut with Bavarian Cream filling, a flavor worthy of the legendary guitar it became.  And this Evil Cake Genius just got a little cooler.

Blue Hawaii

"For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surf is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud-rack; I can feel the spirit of its woody solitudes, I hear the plashing of the brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago."
- Mark Twain

I've forever been in love with Hawaii.  From the first time I caught a glimpse of it on that awesome two part episode of "The Brady Bunch" (yeah, I said it, cursed tiki necklace and all) to the last time I begrudgingly boarded the Wiki wiki bus to the departure gates to come back to my frozen home, it has never failed to amaze me. 

What better, than to marry (pun intended) the most idyllic place on earth with the most romantic day of your life?  Jena and Jason were smart enough to combine the two...even better, they were smart enough to do so in the dead of winter, giving themselves and their closest friends and family an excuse to escape the cold Colorado and Minnesota winter.

Unfortunately, the cake lady didn't make the guest list, but I did get the next best thing.  The joy of channeling all of my Hawaii love into a cake for their Minnesota reception two weeks after the wedding.

The couple wanted a cake design that would acknowledge their Island nuptials, while not going so tropical in feel as to cause a mutiny among those Minnesotans who were looking at frosting orchids and sand while shaking the snow out of their high heels and dress shoes.  So, we created one of my favorite types of cakes...the trompe l'oeil.  The cake that doesn't look like a cake...a still-life in sugar!  We would make the cakes look like a stack of suitcases that had just arrived back from their trip.  An orchid lei resting on top of the stack, and my favorite, a frosting postcard that bears the post mark and date of the actual wedding. 

We've done suitcases before, but this time, we wanted something a little sweeter, a little more airy and dreamy.  So, I researched antique pastel suitcases online, and came up with a photo of a great suitcase cake to copy.  It wasn't until after I printed it out that I realized, it wasn't a cake at all, but an actual stack of suitcases (my first clue should have been that they were sitting on top of a dog kennel).  I showed this photo to Jena and Jason, who agreed...it wasn't a cake, but it needed to become one.  So we did a little color tweaking to include their cheery orchid green into the design, and the rest is cake-history.

We set up the cake on a beautiful winter evening.  I rarely get to see my client's reactions to their cakes, but since this was a reception, no ceremony before to detain the bride and groom, they arrived early, and I got to catch a shot of Jena discovering her cake.  If her hands don't say it all, maybe the shot including the cake as a member of the bridal party does! 

P.S.  Much thanks to the bride and groom for sharing their beautiful photos with us, and thanks to Carr Photography (even though we're still holding a slight grudge, that they got to cover the Hawaiian portion of the wedding as well as the Minnesota reception (we really need to open a Hawaii branch, Gateaux II, open November through March).