A "P.S." on Centerpiece Cakes

I received a few emails yesterday on the "Centerpiece Cakes" article. It seems some guests are not fans of centerpiece cakes. I'll share their stories so brides who are contemplating centerpiece cakes can think about how they might handle some of these stories.

Sandy was a guest at a wedding that had different flavored cakes on the tables. If your cake had chocolate cake and you wanted carrot cake, you were expected to roam from table to table trying to trade your chocolate for carrot. Sandy said the bride's idea was to get everyone to intermingle and "get to know each other".

Sandy told me, "I work with the bride and I'm never going ever meet her family or the groom's family again. I have no need to get to know them. I thought she humilated her guests by practically making them go table to table and begging for food. Because that's what it looked like to me ... that they were begging for cake from other people."

Stephen shared the story of the bride and groom who followed many magazine suggestions and went from table to table, cutting the cakes themselves for their guests. Said Stephen, "I understand how this enabled the couple to meet and greet each guest, and if this had been a small wedding of 100 or so, it might have worked. But when you have 325 guests, this takes a while, and those in the far corners of the room, who had to wait for their cake to be cut, were getting peeved. Especially those who had small children who were just too impatient to get their cake. Sitting next to a table of crying kids was not fun for the other guests."

Liz said the people at her table didn't realize it was a real cake that was going to be cut for dessert, so their cake was full of finger holes where people poked it. Liz passed on dessert because she "...wasn't about to eat finger-poked cake!"

T.J. loved the centerpiece cakes and the guests cut their own cakes. "I just felt bad for the bride and groom because every table had about half of the cake leftover and I just kept wondering how they were going to store a bunch of half-cut cakes or if they were just going to throw it all away. Either way, it seemed like such a waste."

I've read articles with these very same suggestions to brides. These emails show me that an idea is one thing .... executing it is another.

My husband has a saying in his family about "Paper is a wonderful thing. It will just lay there and let you write ANYTHING on it." Which means, just because it works on paper, doesn't mean it works in reality.

As I mentioned in the previous blog, I think centerpiece cakes can look really nice on a guest table. Just be sure you have a great execution plan to serve your guests quickly and easily.

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