Wedding Planning: Cake Tasting Done!

Back in July during our 1 year Blogiversary post, we promised we'd divulge more wedding planning and details as they shape up here on the blog. Well, we're slowly but surely shaping up plans for our big day coming up in June and one thing we were able to cross off the list this week was the cake!

After stopping in Pearl's Cupcake Shoppe a few weekends back, we thought this could be a great place to start out tasting and figuring out the whole "wedding cake" part of the wedding. To our surprise, it couldn't have been easier.

This little cupcake shop has won all sorts of awards here in Richmond over the past year and is just a fun place to go — it's got cute decor and vintagey details from the walls, to the floors, to the mini chandeliers and little cake stands all over the shop:

We knew we wanted to go with a local bakery and had a few in mind, including Dollop, which specializes in home-style cakes made using only local ingredients, though they're not yet offering wedding size cakes. Of all the other options, Pearle's Cupcake Shoppe was the first on our list to set up a tasting with.

We like that Pearle's uses local ingredients in their cakes where possible and embraces a nostalgic look and feel — right up our alley, no?

We were able to book the tasting and choose up to 5 flavors from their website menu to sample in the shoppe during our tasting. Knowing chocolate wasn't an option (can you believe Tim and his daughter both aren't fans of chocolate???), we easily agreed on the following 4 flavors:

1. Cherry Pie A-La-Mode
2. Red Velvet
2. The Norma Jean
3. The Queen Bee

When we arrived, we didn't really know what to expect but were greeted with a cake stand filled with two cupcakes in each flavor we had preselected along with two plates, two forks and one knife:

In general, I'm a frosting kinda gal, so the sheer amount of frosting on these cupcakes was enough to make me fall in love. The shop owner recommended we cut only 1 of each in half to taste since whatever cupcakes we didn't eat they would box up for us to take home with us, on them — how cool is that?

First we tried the Cherry Pie cupcake:

While not the perfect fit for our wedding cake, I have to say that the cherry pie a-la-mode cupcake is just downright sinful. It's light and fluffy white cake, with cherry pie filling INSIDE the cupcake, topped with a heaping serving of cream cheese frosting and more cherry pie filling. It's what I'll be ordering as a cupcake from here on out when stopping into Pearle's.

Next came the red velvet — which is my all time favorite cake flavor. I thought this might be the winner until we moved on....

To The Queen Bee. The Queen Bee consisted of honey flavored cake, honey buttercream frosted and drizzled honey on top. It sounds like too much honey, I know, but Tim and I both surprisingly fell in love with this cake flavor and immediately decided it was for us.

We went ahead and tried the Norma Jean, which was vanilla cake with white chocolate frosting, you know, to make sure we were making the right call, haha:

Going into it, I thought this might be the winner from it's simplicity, but we both still agreed we liked the honey cake the best.

So that was that! We decided to just end the Richmond cake tasting gauntlet there and move forward with ordering — which took place in the midst of a sugar induced jittery excitement after all of this:

We'll end up with at least 3 small tiers and are contemplating a "rough coat" icing style, which is sort of that home-style look you can get. We're not completely settled on the final design, but feel like we got one more task crossed off the big ole list of wedding things we need to get done!

After placing the cake order, they let us know that all couples who order cakes through them end up getting a $20 gift certificate good to bring back on or near their 1st year wedding anniversary to purchase a 6 inch "topper" size cake in the flavor of their original wedding cake. We thought this was such a sweet idea! Another thing we like is the fact that they will deliver the cake to the reception site and set it up to make sure everything goes smoothly for no additional charge.

So other than already deciding on ceremony and reception destinations and a few other details, this is where we are! We've got lots more to plan for and do, but as with everything we do, we're taking it one small step at a time.

Oh, and these were the cupcakes we brought back home with us:

Do I even need to say they've disappeared already??? Didn't think so...

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