Wedding Wednesdays: The Cake & Cupcakes!

Welcome back to my next Wedding Wednesday post. :) Thanks for joining me!

Today I thought I'd share our choices for our wedding cake! Mike and I decided to go for cupcakes for our guests and a small, round cake that would be our wedding cake for the ceremonious cutting of the cake. I love the look of tiered cakes, and we considered going that route, but ultimately, cupcakes just felt so fun and are such an easy way for guests to enjoy a sweet treat at the end of the night, so that's what we went with! 

Several people asked me if I'd be making our wedding cake and my answer was always "definitely not!" Yes, I love baking, but there was no way I was going to add one more thing to my wedding planning plate. I was more than happy to let someone else do the baking! And that "someone" was our venue, Jimbo's Club at the Point. They have a pastry chef right on site, and after our tasting, we were incredibly pleased with how delicious their cake flavors were, so it was an easy decision to go with Jimbo's and not have to search for an off-site baker to make our cake/cupcakes.

At our tasting, we sampled several different cupcake and frosting flavors (see pic below). The frostings were amazing! Several of them had booze in them, which was fun. ;)

There were such frostings as cabernet chocolate, Grand Marnier, and cannoli! In the end, we chose two different frostings: Bailey's chocolate and creme de menthe Oreo. Both were incredible! We went with a vanilla cupcake underneath the Bailey's chocolate and a chocolate cupcake for the creme de menthe Oreo. For our own wedding cake, we decided on a pumpkin cake with a classic vanilla frosting. Oh man, was it amazing. I definitely wanted a fall flavor in there somehow, so that's how we decided on pumpkin for our own cake. And, just in case any of our guests weren't huge fans of chocolate (or booze in their frosting), we thought we could offer our pumpkin cake with vanilla frosting to them instead of a cupcake.

Here are some pictures of our delicious wedding cake, cupcakes, and the cake cutting! :)

(Note: these pics are a mix of professional ones and ones taken by our guests)

Mike picked out the fun cake topper we had. He loves to fish (and got his love of fishing from his dad!), so this cake topper was perfect for us. And it fit our Adirondacks venue nicely too!

We had made some signs to put next to the cupcakes so our guests would know what flavors there were!

I love the background of these pics, with so many guests having their cameras and phones out to take pics. 

I love this pic below, as it's when Mike was pointing to a little bit of frosting that I had on the side of my mouth after he fed me a bite of cake.

And I also love the reflection of the lights from inside the room in the window. It looks like there's fireworks outside!

Sealed with a kiss, of course!! ♥

Isn't that the cutest little sign?! My mom gave this to us, and it was such a perfect, sweet addition to the cake table. :)

See you again later this week for some fun Valentine's Day ideas!

Wedding Wednesdays: Centerpieces, Table Names & Decor

 Hello, and welcome to my second edition of Wedding Wednesdays! In case you missed my first post, you should probably go back and check it out. ;)  In it, I share all the fun details about the homebrewed beer that we gave our wedding guests as favors!

We were psyched about how those came out, so it was a really fun post to write. In fact, I am sure that all of these posts will be fun for me to write! And that's partially why I wanted to start this Wedding Wednesdays series. Another reason is because I wanted to share with you various aspects of our big day! And yet another reason is selfish; I thought the blog would be a great tool for me to record the details of our day and how we put them together...so, this blog is also serving as my own "memory journal" that I can look back on in the coming years. Hope you don't mind. :)

I also plan to write a "Part 2" post about wedding favors (we gave another small favor in addition to the homebrew), and that will be on its way in the next couple weeks. This week I wanted to share with you what we did for our table decor and centerpieces!

As you may know, Mike and I were married in upstate NY, where I am originally from. Our reception venue, Jimbo's Club at the Point, is a gorgeous venue on Brant Lake in the Adirondacks.

The setting is very "Adirondack-y," as we say, and the venue kind of speaks for itself, you know? It is so pretty on its own, so we didn't feel like we needed centerpieces or decor that were too complicated. We were going for a natural and simple look.

We went with the basic white tablecloths, but to add a splash of color to the tables, we ordered burgundy table runners from a great wholesale site, Koyal Wholesale, that has all sorts of wedding and event decorations. They were rather inexpensive and well worth it, we thought!

For the actual centerpieces on each of the tables, we used hurricane lanterns that Jimbo's had (we had to rent them from them - nothing comes free in the wedding world ;)), but renting their hurricane lanterns was much easier than buying our own lanterns, transporting them there, and having to figure out what to do with them afterward. So that part was easy! It took a while for us to decide on what to put around the lanterns (I had so many centerpiece ideas on my "wedding decor" pinterest board!), but we finally settled on a very natural centerpiece that created a "wreath" by combining pinecones and bittersweet vine.

(photo source)

We were very fortunate with our connections, as one of our wedding guests had tons of bittersweet growing at her house, and we were able to take some of hers. This same friend also had hundreds of dried pinecones that we were also able to borrow, thankfully. And my mother-in-law and sister also collected and dried some pinecones to make sure we had enough. Perfect!!

The day before the wedding, we assembled the wreaths of pinecones and bittersweet around each lantern on each of the tables. I have to admit though that I did very little of this part! My mother-in-law, mom, and bridesmaids did it all and did an amazing job! It took some patience, that's for sure, and I'm so grateful for their time and hard work!

Instead of table numbers, we used brewery names! Obviously the husband and I are into our craft beer, so we thought brewery names would be the perfect way to identify our guests' tables. We chose our favorite breweries and/or those that we have traveled to together.

You may also notice on the table that we had ribbons tied around each napkin, for another small touch of color. I ordered the ribbon from a different website than where the runners were from, and luckily, the colors matched exactly!

To save space and to minimize how many items were on the tables, we printed one table menu for each table, and we glued the menu, back-to-back style, to the table's brewery name sign. So easy!

Being that we live in Boston and have been to the Sam Adams brewery numerous times, that was obviously one of the table names!

Mike and I had our first date back in '08 at James's Gate, a brewpub in Jamaica Plain, MA. Although the head table didn't really need a name, we couldn't resist naming our head table after the location of where we first met! It's not exactly a brewery, but it's close enough. :)

For the head table, instead of a pinecone and bittersweet wreath around a lantern, we just created a nice arrangement of the pinecones and bittersweet, centered on the table, as you see below.

We had so much fun coming up with the ideas for our tables, putting them together, and then seeing the final "look" come together so nicely. We love how they turned out and felt that they fit our day very well!

Also, unless otherwise specified, most of the pictures in my wedding blog posts were taken by our wonderful photographers, Upstate Photographers. Gotta give credit where credit is due!

Thanks for checking out my second Wedding Wednesday post! ;)