Cake for Dinner

This morning we headed up for a chilly winter day in Maine to taste some treats from our catering company. We also got to see our ceremony/reception venue again and make some mental notes about decorations, place settings, and all that jazz. Going in we were quite excited for delicious food and hanging out with the parents.

After finding a seat and a Kir Royal (it was 12:02, a perfectly acceptable to drink) I glanced through the packet of questions Black Tie gave me to help hone in on our catering and rental costs. The first question I noticed was "Married Title:" and inwardly groaned about all of the things I have yet to decide. Questions further into the packet like "Guest Napkin Color:" and "Once introduced, the bridal party will go to: (head table/dance floor/individual tables)" made me seriously doubt my planning this past year, so I put the packet away and out of my mind and tucked into a plateful of randomly selected appetizers.

To be honest, of the six hors d'oeuvres we were offered, I would not have chosen any of them. But since they were put before me I tried most of them, and some were tasty, and some were not. I forgot to take a picture until after I ate them (oops), so you will have to believe me. A raspberry-and-brie combo proved tasty and a Thai pork cup was yummy, and though neither will likely be featured at the wedding they gave us a taste for the kinds of foods with which we want to open the food portion of our wedding.

Next up was a generic basket of rolls and three different salads. We assumed we would go with a plain ol' salad, but a fancier salad caught our eyes taste buds and was the first item of our tasting menu to make it onto the official wedding menu! Here it is:

Mesclun Greens Salad with Dried Cranberries, Feta, & Spicy Pecans with Champagne Vinaigrette

After our salad options we moved onto a buffet of 10ish entree options, running the gamut from meaty to vegetarian to starch sides. We liked the beef options a lot, the chicken a little, the fish and raviolis and cold asparagus not at all, and the potatoes were decent. It was a good survey of Black Tie's entree options, and while our main dishes offered will likely not be those we had today we learned a lot. A good portion of that lesson was that buffet lines suck and things get cold. Unless the price difference is in the thousands, we will probably choose the plated option for everybody's comfort.

Stuffed to the brim and ready to move along, they shoved a box of cake samples at us and we hit the road. After some dallying with parents we headed back to Boston and let our stomachs un-fill a bit before trying the cake. When we could once again stomach the idea of food, we opened our cake box and found this:

(The cake samples were marble, lemon, red velvet and toasted almond. Frosting samples were regular buttercream, Italian buttercream, chocolate buttercream, cream cheese, and raspberry bavarian cream.)

We not-so-gracefully slathered different frosting on bites of different cakes and proceeded to live out a childhood dream: we had cake for dinner. I of course now realize why my parents did not allow that particular dream, as all the sugar made me want to throw up. With the nausea subsiding, I present our cake reviews:

Marble and Almond cakes -- fine, but sort of boring.
Lemon cake -- delicious, but not Vader's cup of tea
Red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting -- heavenly. Will be a featured cupcake at the wedding.
Chocolate and vanilla buttercream -- tasted like the frosting my high schoolers could make last year. Eh.
Italian buttercream -- smooth and a good accent taste to a flavorful cake. May adorn our cutting cake.
Raspberry bavarian cream -- quite good. Vader literally just licked the plastic cup of it clean, so I think he's a fan. Will be featured at the wedding in a cupcake named something like "Raspberry Explosion."

Along with the two cupcakes to emerge out of our tasting cakes, we will probably feature the "Chocolate Bourbon-Pecan" cupcake and the "Carrot Supreme" cupcake. Use your imagination for what's in them :)

Lastly, all this cake talk led to a bit more wedding conversation. We decided we want a whitish cutting cake for cute pictures, that Vader may or may not sub in a groomsman's sword for our cutting knife (because no, we don't have custom wedding cake tools and we REALLY don't need them), and that while we will probably smush cake on each other for the camera it had better not get out of hand. Who's jazzed for cake?

Shoes

Anybody remember that terrible "shoes" video of YouTube fame from a few years ago? It is, unfortunately, now running through my head. And yours, if you just looked it up. Sorry.

When  I was 17 and shopping for shoes to match my custom-made-by-MOH-Moxie pink prom dress, I bought shoes embarrassingly close to those on the top left in this photo:

Bound and determined to never give up my fascination with flip flops, I declared to my mother at the time that I would wear similar shoes on my wedding day. She responded with something along the lines of "You'd better not," and I smugly ignored her and dreamed of my sparkly, platform, eight dollar wedding shoes. 

In the almost nine years since, I've grown up a tad. When I tried on wedding dresses the David's Bridal lady had me pick out shoes and I snagged the lowest heels they had in Bigfoot my size. It turned out I liked the kitten heel height with the dress, though not that particular shoe, and I kept it in the back of my mind. Now eager to check off something easy on the "to-do for the wedding" list, I turned to Zappos and looked for the highest-rated kitten heel in white. About a hundred women had written reviews about a particular shoe's comfort and how they all wore them at their wedding with no pain, so I bought them. 

Here's what they look like: 

And on my feet...

And from the side...

I wore them around the house, and they do seem extremely comfortable. My only concern is whether my poor little pinky toes will get irritated from being cooped up in the band across the toes. Once I have tried them on with the dress to make sure they work I will once again deliberate about my toes' freedom.

Though it doesn't really matter. Because under my chair (for a quick change before dancing) will be these bad boys: 

Come on Mom, did you really think I had moved on completely?

Laughing at myself

I consider myself to be a fairly practical person. I have my TLC marathons from time to time and can not stop biting my nails for the life of me, but I generally get what I need to do done before I have fun.

I also consider myself to be a somewhat very snarky person. Which means I laugh when people ask me seemingly unimportant questions or slyly comment when time could be better spent in meetings or presentations.

As it turns out, when I have made the major wedding decisions and start to plan the details, I throw practicality to the wind and spend absurd amounts of time considering decisions that will have little to no impact on the actual day. Then the snark kicks in and I laugh uproariously at my own ridiculousness. Picking pinks while watching David Tutera (I would make a hilarious, terrible wedding reality show) and laughing at myself, I'm a big ol' bucket of weird.

Without further ado, here are the VERY IMPORTANT things I have been deliberating for the wedding this week:

1.) What color bags should I get for containing the candy buffet treats? Black? White? Black & White?

2.) Which color pink paper best matches the "Petunia" color of the bridesmaid dress sashes? I'm not kidding. Here are the 4 different pinks I got in the mail today, surrounding the sash swatch. There may or more not be eight more pinks in the mail arriving in the next couple of days...

3.) Should the pink invitation mat be the full size of the invitation (6.25") or slightly less (~ 6 3/16")? As it turns out, it needs to be smaller.

Please, please laugh at me for spending time thinking about this stuff. In a couple of years I hope to look back on blog entries like these to remember the important things in life :)

Traditions: A spectrum

While looking over some ideas for what our ceremony will look like, I was struck by the number of decisions we have made thus far related to keeping or breaking wedding traditions. In a lot of ways our plans can be separated easily into the traditional and non-traditional categories, but I find myself struggling with the "gray area" details I have yet to pin down. First, let's review the easily categorized wedding moments:

Some wedding traditions I'm all for
-a white dress
-bouquet chucking
-not letting Vader see me in the dress until the day of the wedding
-dances with our parents
-an announcement of us as "husband and wife"
-the 4 "somethings"

Some wedding traditions we'll be leaving out
-the garter toss
-addressing invitations to "Mr. and Mrs. Man's-first-name Man's-last name"
-being married in a church/by a religious figure
-any part of the ceremony involving visual representation of our lives joining (sand ceremony, unity candle, etc.)
-any referral ever to us as "man and wife"

Some of these I feel strongly about as a woman, some as a somewhat religious person, and frankly some because they're fun. At any rate, we are fairly evenly split between conforming to and bucking against typical wedding traditions.

This leaves me the dilemma of choosing whether I want to embrace the traditional or the non-traditional for things like our processional/recessional music or vows. We plan on writing our own vows (expect a corny love poem with a lot of rhyming from me while Vader schools me with his romanticism), but I am pondering incorporating the traditional vows before or after our individual input. I am at a complete loss for the music, on the other hand. As of now we are equally likely to walk in to hymns as we are to Justin Bieber. Anything but Pachelbel's Canon at the behest of MOH Moxie.

Perhaps we will walk in and out to "Tradition(s?)" from Fiddler on the Roof and avoid the whole decision.

Pictures!

Last weekend, we finally got to meet our photographer! She was great, and we got to see her work pre-wedding with our included engagement pictures. Since most of my posts are rambling things, I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. Here are our favorites!

The piggyback pose shots are favorites

Christmas cards next year?

Another favorite! 

The Old Port was a fabulous place to show off our collective cuteness, and we're pretty excited for similarly wonderful shots from the wedding and the after-party!

details

Over my years of crafting/being a student/being a teacher/planning a wedding, I have gathered a strange collection of crafting supplies. Since we moved in, I stored these supplies in a cloth 3-drawer organizer next to my bedroom closet. After weeks of finding plastic army guys, earring holders, pipe cleaners, and pom-pom balls littered about the house, however, I realized that the cloth drawers were no match for my curious and digging kitty. The mess, coupled with the New Year's holiday, led to a very thorough cleaning and rearranging of my craft materials into a less penetrable (by a cat) container.

In my cleaning I came across a few stamps I wanted to try out on our invitation envelopes, and got to playing. I like the way they came out, aside from the fact that the feet of the guys up top show through the front side of the envelope. Here's what the invitation envelope looks like when unsealed:

The little guide lines on the edges of the flap would not be there, but I was pretty pleased with what I thought was a cutely decorated (otherwise boring) envelope without the need for tape or glue.

Having done the wedding invitation assembly herself a year ago, last night Bridesmaid Madonna thoughtfully pointed out that the cuteness of the top would likely be lost on not-careful (read: normal) mail openers. When I open my mail, I slip my finger under the flap and rip along the seam, as I imagine most people do. That would leave our cute little "falling in love" stamp as a bunch of ripped stick feet. I would show you what it would look like but I can't bring myself to rip the little dudes in half, so use your imagination. Stick feet appeal to the romantic in me far less than the full stamp, so we quickly started talking about other options. Her suggestions were that we instead put the three-panel stamp on the closed back flap of the envelope so that everyone would see it before ripping open the envelope. I like this a lot, but then wonder if the proximity to the stamp at the bottom would be too much. We could also move one of the stamps to the front bottom of the envelope (below the address), but I'm worried about crowding it. So, because it is downright CRUCIAL that I decide this tonight (please, please read that with a heavy note of sarcasm), would you vote:

1.) 3-panel on the outside flap of back, wedded couple in bottom corner of back as well

2.) 3-panel on the outside flap of back, wedded couple on bottom corner of front

3.) 3-panel on bottom back of envelope, wedded couple on bottom corner of front

4.) Screw it! Feet all the way