Wedding Planning - Bakery Visit and Meeting the Caterer

Today has been a busy day! We now have all the wedding food sorted though, so a big one to cross off the list! :)

This morning, Mum and I drove for almost an hour to visit the bakery we were hoping would do the wedding cupcakes. Old photo from my Exeter Food Festival re-cap post, but as I didn't take any photos today, this is what some of their cakes looked like when we first discovered the bakery...

we bought a few cakes to take home and they were fabulous, so on Tuesday I phoned the bakery to find out if they would be free to make cakes for our wedding (we had discussed at the Food Festival that they do cater for weddings). Anyway, this morning Mum and I went over there to discuss the details in person. At first I'd thought a purple version of the above pink cakes would be nice, but in the end we came up with even better ideas! We're going to have 80 cupcakes - 40 lemon cupcakes topped with purple icing, piped in a rose effect hopefully something like this...

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and then 40 coffee cupcakes with cream icing and purple sugar paste flowers that the bakery are going to make themselves, something a bit like this...

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although I think they're aiming to make the purple flowers a bit like daisies. They normally order the sugar paste flowers from a catalogue but as they only come in bulk packs of 100+ they're gonna make them in-house...I'm sure they're going to be great! I'm really glad I took some images along, as alongside the bakery's ideas, they provided great inspiration!

The bakery also hire out big multi-tiered perspex stands for free when you buy cakes from them, and for the top tier they're going to make a small round Victoria sponge cake covered in fondant icing to match the cream cupcakes' butter icing, with some of the small purple flowers 'sprinkled' on top. I'm really looking forward to seeing the cakes on the day, exciting! It'll be nice to have a small cake to cut into, but the cupcakes will be easier to hand out - I'm hoping Liam and I can take the cupcakes round to the guests part way through the reception...hopefully it will give us more of an opportunity to chat to people as well!

The bakery itself was so busy - a queue out the door, and 3 A4 sheets on the wall with just Friday's pre-orders for collection (as well as all the walk-in customers obviously) We couldn't resist buying a couple of bits. What Mum and I both really wanted was the chocolate brownie tray bakes we'd got from the Food Festival, but there were none in sight! We asked after them and were told they were still in the oven but if we came back in 10 minutes we could buy some. The perfect excuse for a coffee! I had an iced one as I was really thirsty after all the cake chat!!

I don't think they'd added any sugar, but I still drank it without. It wasn't sweet, obviously, but it was still yummy...I'm trying to cut down the sugar I "need" to add into my drinks anyway (plus regular, non-liquid, sugar doesn't mix well with a cold drink), but I still need something in my hot coffees for now!

Back to the bakery. We did both buy a brownie tray bake - still really hot from the oven...

Yum, I'm saving our one for a treat for tomorrow - if we'd started it today I'd no doubt have finished it off on my own tonight!! I also got a caramel shortbread for Liam to take to work, and Mum got a raspberry and chocolate muffin for me and her to share...

So fresh and delicious! Almost too fresh if that's even possible - it fell apart a bit when I cut it in half! Yum!

After a quick trip home for lunch - egg mayonnaise on seeded toast...

it was time to go back to Mum's to meet with the wedding caterer. She was recommended to us by my Grandma as she caters for their Bridge Club dos, as well as catering at the local Cricket Club and the Rugby Club most weekends. I think she'd only done a few weddings - apparently she normally avoids them because of the stress involved! - so any apprehensive feelings she might have had probably weren't helped when Mum mentioned that I write a food blog so all her food would appear on here after the wedding!! Oh well, she still agreed to do it :)

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The above photo clearly isn't food, but it is purple - our wedding colour - and we're planning to have bows on our chairs like that and possibly table runners - I'm in a 'getting lots of ideas down' mood today! I do realise that the majority of the photos in today's post are not my own. Not what I usually do, but it's difficult to show photos to do with wedding planning as I won't actually have any photos of the food, cakes etc until the wedding day has happened! I like searching on Google for lots of different images for inspiration though, so this post will be good to look back on! :)

Despite hiring a caterer, we're still planning to have a cold buffet, and actually most of the food she suggested is what we had planned anyway - cold meats, coronation chicken, poached salmon etc. For the vegetarian options she's going to do some quiches and roast peppers, served cold, stuffed with a couscous/veg mix. For the salads she's going to do the standard green salad, mozzarella & tomato, and coleslaw as well as a mango & beansprout salad (her suggestion - a bit different - I'll be interested to try it!) and quinoa & roast veg salad (my suggestion - she was going to do more couscous but a) I love quinoa and b) we have at least one gluten-free person coming so this will cater for them. I don't think she really knew what quinoa was but she's said she'll buy a bag and experiment on her family so hopefully will turn out well!). She's also going to do bowls of baby beetroot (I will avoid so as not to risk staining my dress!!), hot new potatoes and little bread rolls. It all sounds tasty, and a lot less stressful than doing it ourselves!

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For desserts, she's going to make chocolate profiteroles, raspberry roulade and lemon souffle, as well as buying in chocolate lumpy bumpy cake - one of my sister's and Liam's favourites - yum!

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The only other food to sort is the canapes for the drinks reception. We are doing that ourselves though. Well, some of my Mum's friends will be hopefully! We're going to have smoked salmon blinis, with the blue cheese-fig pate we bought at the food festival for the vegetarian option...

Mum trying the pate before buying!

Not sure whether to serve the pate on blinis or little Ritz crackers though? I think the crackers would work better with the soft pate, but Mum is worried they'll go soggy, as the canapes will be made up in the morning and not served until about 4.30pm. We bought plenty of pate (it is sold frozen and can be stored in the freezer for, I think, up to 6 months) so we'll just have to do a trial run!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a summary of our wedding food-to-be! This has been one of my main focuses in the wedding planning - I much prefer thinking about food than shoe shopping (which, sadly, is one of the tasks lined up for tomorrow!) although I'm sure on the actual wedding day I'll have so many other things to think about that I won't actually notice the food as much as I think I will!! At least I now know in advance that it should all be delicious! :)