Pittsburgh Wedding: Ashley + Eddie

Sometimes serendipitous things happen in your life that you can't explain.  Things you can't explain but that are awesome and fun and make your days brighter.  Baking for Ashley and Eddie's Pittsburgh wedding last month was one of those moments.

For those of you who are unaware, Ashley is a Pittsburgh-area crafter behind the Papyrusaurus site on Etsy (and Facebook).  We've been fans of her stuff for awhile, and always creep when we stumble across her booth at craft fairs.

A few months ago she contacted us to see if we'd make her a unique cake for her wedding day.  Um, of course we would!  Can you fan girl a crafter??  Not sure, but we were definitely excited to work with her.

What we love about weddings is it gives some people the opportunities to let their personalities really show.  We wrote a post earlier this year about why we think you should try the fondant-free wedding cake option, and Ashley and Eddie decided to go with that!  Yay!

They wanted a colorful tiered cake with lots of blues and greens in it, and we loved the idea of a non-white wedding cake.  Plus the wedding cake toppers they made for the big day were adorable too.

Oh yeah, and did we mention they have a love for maple bacon cupcakes too?  Because they do.  And it's a perfect addition to any wedding reception in our opinion! 

Congrats on your big day Ashley and Eddie!  So glad we could be a part of the celebration!

The Case for Fondant-Free Weddings

Happy 4th everyone!  We'd like to point out this holiday is a bit pointless, as we technically signed the Declaration of Independence on July 2 (they didn't have twitter back then, so communication was a bit delayed), but we'll go along with the masses and celebrate our freedom from England on this day with the rest of yinz.  After all, fireworks are the best!

Before we eat ourselves into a hot dog coma later today, we figured we'd continue with another "The Case for" post.  If you've missed any of our previous ones, they'll be listed at the end of this entry.

Today, we're tackling the non-traditional idea of going fondant-free for your wedding cake.  For many of you, the idea may seem sacrilegious.  No fondant on a wedding cake??  Who would dream of such a thing?

A lot of people, actually.  It's becoming quite a popular anti-trend, and you'll see them pop up with a little more frequency if you're in the midst of wedding season too.  A lot of couples are starting to think outside the creative box for their weddings, and their end result is a non-traditional cake.

So why should you consider whether going fondant-free is the right choice for you??  Here are 3 reasons why it might be a better decision for your wedding than you ever dreamed it could be:

1. Fondant-free cakes give you more aesthetic texturing options.

If you're one of those people who likes to live their life in a textured world, fondant-free cakes give you a range of options that traditional wedding cakes cannot.  Fondant covers up the cake, smoothing out and hiding any wrinkles or imperfections that might exist.  For some, this is exactly what they want.  But if you like to see texture, and design that is different, and unique (and maybe, in some aspects, not cookie-cutter perfect), giving up fondant is a way to achieve this look.  Look at the cakes below, none of which have fondant covering them:

All three are designs that are unique in their ability to capture more than just color and beauty: they capture texture too.

2. People hate fondant

Poll 100 people about their love for fondant, and 75% of them will tell you they hate the taste.  Hate it.  Why would you have a cake for others to view/and eat covered with fondant if it's something people routinely hate?  Granted, many reception halls will give you the option to remove the fondant from the cake before they serve it, but it's another step between cutting the cake and guests eating the cake that must be completed.  We don't know about you, but once the cake is cut, we want some!  No, really, waiting is the worst!

3. You can be creative with your design

Some couples like a simple cut-and-dry approach to their wedding.  They want everything to be simple, and planned and taken care of for them, especially little details they're not interested in, like the cake, or the flowers.  We get that, and there's nothing wrong if you realize you're that kind of person.  But on the other hand, some like to have fun with those little wedding details, make them unique and personalized.  And if that's more how you see your wedding unfolding, then a fondant-free wedding cake may give you a bigger range of creativity options with your design.

Don't get us wrong: if you want your wedding cake to be an exact scale model of the Death Star (please invite us to your wedding if this is the case!), fondant will give you the creative look and professional finish you're looking for.  Themed cakes like that almost require you to use fondant.  But this cake below, from this wedding blog, shows how two book worms can use their love of reading in their cake for a one-of-a-kind look that doesn't require fondant:

How beautiful is that?  Who wouldn't want to eat a cake covered in their favorite poem, or chapter from their favorite book??  It's a beautiful cake, and something as simple and as elegant as this can be achieved without fondant!  Crazy!

The bottom line, as always, is we encourage you to really think about what you want from your cake before you commit to what you think your wedding cake has to look like.  There are no rules when it comes to cake.  Except that you must eat it.  For some of you, fondant may not be the direction you want to go in, and that's perfectly ok.  Explore your options.  Don't be afraid to bake outside the box.  Take a small step towards crazy once in awhile and the results may be magnificent.

Oh, and if you've missed any of our other The Case For posts, catch up on some reading now before the fireworks!

The Case for Fake Cake Tiers
The Case for Gluten-Free
The Case for Buttermilk

Enjoy the beautiful weekend, everyone!!

Pittsburgh Wedding: Jessica + David

Catching up on some blogging this weekend, because June has been an absolutely crazy month for us.  You never seem to realize how far behind a vacation will throw your schedule until you look at the calendar and realize next weekend is Independence Day Weekend.  Yikes!

Earlier this month we made a wedding cake for Jessica and David, who were getting married in the North Hills.  We met Jessica and David back in February (remember when it was so cold you could barely move) and we all had this idea that it would be fun to have some creative flavors for their wedding cake.  And who doesn't love creative flavors??  We decided to go with a strawberry and chocolate cake AND a lemon raspberry cake.  Who doesn't love options??

About to head into the oven for some major baking. 

Raspberry icing, yummmmmmm

The cake was big enough that we needed to use some dowel rods for structural support, which is a very nerdy way to say the cake was pretty heavy.  Oops, did we just let a secret slip??  Yeah we probably did, but it's true, heavy cakes require additional support to keep them together.  It's not all smoke and mirrors, guys!

We're pretty pleased with how the end result turned out.  Humidity was working against us that day, and the minute we stepped outside the fondant started to pull apart.  It happens to the best of us sometimes.  We had to do a quick repair job to keep it stabilized, but in the end it came out how we had hoped!

A final congratulations to Jessica and David for getting married, and another order completed by PSR.  Yay wedding season!! :)

We'll be back blogging some more soon, don't miss out!

The Case for Fake Cake Tiers

In our ongoing (though often neglected) "The Case For" series, we examine some unconventional baking ideas, habits, or recipes that might not be what you'd see in your typical bakery.  Click here for The Case For Gluten Free and here for The Case for Buttermilk.

Wedding cakes!  We'll admit, we have them on the brain recently!  We have a wedding coming up in less than a month's time, so we've been slowly prepping everything for the big day.  (also, the wedding happens to be the day before PSR shuts down for a well-deserved week of sun and sand and vacation, so getting to that wedding is our only goal right now).

There are so many people who will tell you so many things about choosing the right wedding cake.  You've probably heard all of these and more before:

"Choose a baker who will offer you a discount."

"Avoid fondant at all costs."

"Skip the big cake, go with a small one to cut and sheet cake for the masses."

"Skip the cake all together, go with cupcakes or pies or something memorable."

"Never over-order cake, not everyone eats it."

"Go with classic flavors."

"Go with crazy flavors."

"Save money by requesting fake cake tiers."

Some of these we agree with...some of these make us cringe.  Eventually, if we ever have the time, maybe we'll debunk the pros and cons of each of these.  For now, though, we'd like to take a look at the last one: Saving money by requesting fake cake tiers.

It seems like a novel idea: if you want to save money but still have an amazing cake for all to admire, the cheap solution (and the one that doesn't leave you with mountains of uneaten cake), is to go with a fake cake.  Simple, right??

Well, it depends on who bakes your wedding cake.  Bakers greatly differ in opinions on whether they will offer a discount at all.  A very common theme for many bakers reads something like this: We still have to decorate the cake, whether it's real or imaginary, so it's the same price!"

To the baker's credit who make these arguments, fake tiers are not easy to decorate.  They are usually made of Styrofoam, which is not easy to cut or carve.  It is also extremely light-weight, which makes it hard to decorate it as you would a nice, thick, dense cake.  Often times it can slide right off the tray when you go to press icing to it.  

Bakers too, have to purchase the fake tiers, which usually doesn't run super cheap, and keep them well preserved until the big day.  That sentence might make you laugh until you accidently drop a 20lb bag of flour on the tier and the Styrofoam warps, leading you to spend more money to replace it.  Trust me, it's happened to me.

Our argument for a reduced price, though, is very simple: we're willing to discount the cost of fake tiers for the flexibility it provides to our bakery.  In the baking world, that cannot be understated.  Because cake is fresh, and must be served fresh, there is only so little "prep work" a bakery can do to get ready for a wedding.  Yes, we can buy all the supplies early, make sure everything's cleaned and ready to go, sometimes if we have to carve a cake we might even bake and freeze it ahead of time so that we can manipulate it as needed, but when it comes down to it there's very little we can do prior to the 48 hours before an event when it involves real cake.  God forbid an actual emergency pops up in our real lives or something.

Fake tiers give us the flexibility of time, though, which is so cherished.  If we want to start decorating the tiers a few days earlier than usual, it doesn't matter.  No one's going to eat it, so as long as it still looks good, we can afford to start the decorating a little earlier than usual.  This allows us time to make sure every last detail is correct and perfect, and gives us enough time to shower before we actually deliver our cake.  

Laugh all you want, but showing up for a delivery with powdered sugar in your hair is not all the rage we thought it was going to be.

The bottom line, if fake tiers are what you're looking for, you need to shop around for a baker who will discount it for you. Some will and some won't.  We discount fake tiers anywhere from 25-40%, depending on what you order with us.  That discount is for the flexibility we have as bakers when we're tasked with decorating a fake tier.

No matter what, your wedding day is about you.  So make sure you choose a cake that fits your needs.  If you want to save money and still have a beautiful cake, do your homework and find a baker/bakery who can help you with your vision.

And if you want to discuss fake tier pricing with us ever, we'd be glad to sit down with you and go over it all.  It's definitely worth the meeting with us!

Wedding Season

By springtime, we're itching to get outside again.  Throw on some shades, find some new shoes, soak up some of those almost-forgotten-about rays.  Winter in Pittsburgh just goes for so long, doesn't it??

Springtime also means we're in full baking mode.  Most of your New Year's resolutions have been abandoned by now, and will birthdays, weddings, and graduations all being scheduled, PSR is usually in overdrive with orders.  This spring is no exception.

We took a month or so off for some personal changes (we moved!), but now that spring has arrived we're back in full swing here.  We are booked solid for the next 3 weeks, and have weddings planned for this summer already!  

Tonight we're celebrating the wedding of a good personal friend of ours.  Kara has been in our lives for 11+ years, and this weekend she is getting married.  This is Kara (and a rare picture of Lis too!):

Timing didn't work out to make her wedding cake (plus, it becomes a lot harder to do that when you're in the wedding), but we decided to make her a cake tonight for her rehearsal dinner.  Because there's no such thing as too much cake when it's your wedding weekend!

Kara loves purple above all else (well....lime green too, but who wants to see a lime green cake??) so we went all out on the purple shades for this cake.  And the flavors underneath are just as yummy: lemon raspberry, vanilla bean almond, and chocolate mocha!  If you haven't forgotten about your New Year's Resolution by now, I bet this is testing your will power!

We'll be back soon with lots more updates, since we have lots of work coming up in the near future.  If you're planning on contacting us for some baking work, might we suggest you do it sooner rather than later??  We're already scheduling well into June for customers!

Enjoy this beautiful weekend, guys!

Unexpected Surprises

Isn't life funny sometimes?  You think you know where your life is headed, and then you get thrown a curve ball.  We had a pretty steady week planned out for the bakery, one order for this weekend, one consultation, nothing major.  It's January, most people are still trying to work off that holiday weight they packed on.

And then, out of no where, it all was flipped upside down.

On Tuesday we received the most unusual call from a bride-to-be.  She's getting married this weekend and at the 11th hour had lost her baker and her wedding cake.  She needed something, anything, for her reception.

At first, we said we couldn't help.  We're leaving for an out-of-town visit this weekend, and the last thing we needed to add to our schedule was a wedding cake.  But then we thought about it...she was frantic, and we could probably throw something together by Friday.  Honestly, we could rearrange a few things, right?

So we made a simple cake for her to cut this weekend on her wedding day.  We cut out lots of rose petals (see above), and shaped them for the cake topper (this is such a labor-intensive process, you have no idea).  We baked two cakes, covered them in fondant, decorated the heck out of them, and after a few hours of work, we're pretty proud with the end results.

We never got around to publishing our goals for 2015 (apologies to the 5 people who actually follow this blog), but one of the things we really hoped to accomplish this year was to become more involved in the Pittsburgh wedding scene.  We have two more consultations lined up next week with brides-to-be, and maybe nothing will come of either meetings, but at least we're getting our name out there more.  We don't want our business to stagnate, and sometimes last year it certainly felt like it was.

So 2015 is off to a great start for us!  Here's hoping it continues past January! 

Springing into April

It finally feels like spring outside!!  Well, minus the snow we had on our car this morning!  Is it too soon to say we've finally put this horrible winter behind us?

In our last post we posted about what dull February it was for our bakery, probably because everyone was too cold to order anything.  March started out with a trip we took to Texas (did you know Texas is warm, even in winter?  Because Texas is warm, and PSR may migrate south soon if next winter is awful too), and then we came back for a nice booming week of business.  Easter cupcake orders have come in, as well as two specialized cakes, and we have a separate cupcake order and wedding cake order currently in the works.  You'll be seeing this blog blow up in the next few weeks as we get underway with our spring time.

Speaking of Easter cupcakes, don't forget to place an order for yours, we only bought so many Cadbury Eggs for our cupcakes, and when we're out, we're out!  We already have half of the spots filled, so don't wait too long.

Check back here in the next few weeks, we'll be updating the blog more frequently with all of the wonderful creations we have in the works.  :-)  Can't wait to reveal them all!

Cupcakes vs. Cakes

As a baker, we have created some pretty amazing treats.  Cookies, pies, cupcakes, cakes, brownies, sugar doves, Swedish rolls, tarts, and a million different types of icings.  Some less successfully than others, we'll admit, but still checking them off our list.  Our favorites, though, usually involve cake, as you faithful readers know.  There's something about a good cake that just make us smile like a Cheshire cat.

Sometimes when customers order with us, they go back and forth between whether they should order a cake or cupcakes for their event/party/wedding/Tuesday night.  We never realized what a serious decision this was until people really struggled to make the ultimate decision.  For some people, this may be the hardest decision they ever have to make.

To help with your ultimate decision, we have compiled the following arguments for choosing both cakes and cupcakes for your special occasion.  Read carefully, and may the best baked goods win!

Choosing Cupcakes

1. Cupcakes are super customizable, which is why we love making them.  For big parties you don't have to stick with one flavor that the entire group has to suffer through.  Heck, half the fun is coming up with the awesome flavor combinations you'll be serving your guests and yourself.  Classic chocolate and vanilla are always winners, but what about pistachio, or peach mango, or even beer cheese and bacon??  Kick your party up a notch with a wonderful dessert flavor adventure for everyone to enjoy.

2. Arranging cupcakes is such an art, and we love the challenge.  At events, it's so much fun to figure out how we're going to arrange the cupcakes for guests to admire, oogle over, and eventually devour.  We've done simple things like tiered platters, and fun designs that involve cake platter, old books, and even cereal bowls.  Staging cupcakes can help tie a theme together, and in larger parties they can be spread to separate locations throughout the party to cut down on lines and potential accidents.  

3. On average, cupcakes will cost you less.  If you have 100 people attending your wedding you order, say, 10 dozen cupcakes for the big day, so you have a few extras on hand.  If the extra 20 cupcakes are there at the end of the night, looks like you have some treats for after the honeymoon, enough to make you happy but not enough to put the bulge on too early into your marriage.  It's a win-win!

With cake, a lot of times you are at the mercy of the "serving size".  The amount of cake you have to buy, and get rid of depends on who is serving it, how much a "serving size" is to them, and how much extra you'll have to buy.  They can't chop half a layer off a cake if you don't need that much--if you buy a 3-tiered cake, you're stuck with all the leftovers, even if you don't want it.  Sure the extra cake is fun to eat for awhile...but eventually, your freezer and your stomach will hate you.

Choosing Cake

1. Cake is the traditional choice.  Sometimes cupcakes just aren't the proper dessert to serve at a function.  Cakes give you that beautiful, elegant drama that cupcakes will never be able to replicate.  If you're going for a bold look, or feel the event won't be as successful with cupcakes, then choosing a cake is definitely the way to go for your event.

2. Cakes tell a story.  While you can place cupcakes in and around a themed setup, it's hard for them to truly portray an emotion other than fun or whimsical.  The size of cupcakes limits the scope of beauty they can present.  Cakes don't have that problem, and can definitely bring the "wow" factor you were missing from a party or event that wasn't there before.

3. Cakes let the creativity flow.  Themed cakes can be as crazy, bright, bold, daring, and elegant as you can imagine.  They can be in any shape imaginable, in any color, in any size, in any flavor.  Cupcakes have some limitations, being trapped in a wrapper.  If you want off-the-wall crazy fun, a cake might be the direction you're looking for.

The verdict is yours to decide.  So what will it be...?  Cakes...or cupcakes...??

Lady Mix-A-Lot

Oh. My. God, Becky, look at her butt!

Ok, maybe that's not me.  But I could be Sir Mix-A-Lot's wife this week, after the arrival, finally of my KitchenAide mixer.

My word this was a long time coming!  As you guys know if you follow my posts, I have wanted this mixer since the dawn of time.  And now it's finally here, in all of its metallic glory, waiting for me to mix something in it.  I'm waiting to break it in until probably tomorrow or Friday, depending on my awful work schedule.  The first order I have is for a dear friend who moved to Massachusetts a few months ago.  She has the winter blues, who wouldn't in Massachusetts, so some cupcakes will soon be on their way to her house soon.  I also have a wedding cake to make this weekend, which means sitting down to invest some good ole' quality time with my rose making skills.  This is definitely the worst part of baking: making roses.  Ugh.  But more about that for another blog post.

For now, I'm gonna freak out a little more about my mixer, grin because I've got a big butt and I cannot lie, and gear up for a full weekend of baking.  

Shake that healthy butt!  Baby got back!