Manolo for the Brides

The lovely Chris Oh, who gifted me with my very own copy of Katamari Damacy back in the day, sent me a link to an entirely too-well-done Katamari wedding cake. Not a topper, not a tier, but an entirely round katamari (a magical ball that allows anything smaller than it to stick to it and make it grow) in wedding cake form.

The bride (known on Flickr as offwithyourtv) and groom should roll it around until they encounter other wedding cakes in order to make a massive megacake.

But instead, they’re going to cut it. I have to admit that until I found the picture below, I was unsure as to how this wedding cake would be portioned out to guests. (Would you look at that dress!)

The answer: Start from the top and work your way down. Looks good, no? It makes me crave cake, in fact. The moral of this post is, of course, that anything done fabulously will be fabulous even if others might consider it weird or geeky or too outlandish for a wedding.

It’s no secret that I love gathered skirts on wedding gowns. Twistie, on the other hand, longs to grab the nearest iron! But my love does come with a few caveats… the gathers have to look sort of natural, rather like one has been enjoying an impromtu picnic in one’s wedding gown on the morning of the ceremony. And the skirt itself must be full enough to facilitate that aesthetic.

There is another sort of gathered skirt (usually found on the bridesmaid) that I’ve come to hate, if only because it does not fulfill my requirements for a messy-but-not-too-messy full skirt. Take a gander at these bridesmaids’ dresses from Raylia Designs:

Now is it just me, or do these skirts look like someone put a tube sock on a ferret and let it roll around for a while*? You know what I mean — the ferret does a little breakdance and the sock gets all skootched up around its midsection. It’s not very attractive on the ferret or on the bridesmaid!

*Dear PETA: Don’t hurt me. I swear the ferret was having fun.

(Note: this was meant to go up on saturday, but clearly I am made of fail and hit the wrong button, because I found it this morning lurking in the depths of the saved drafts. Sorry.)

So.

We’re two weeks into a new series of Bridezillas over on WETV. So far the horror entertainment has included a bride choosing to believe that the groom’s concerns about people not wanting to wander from table to table searching for clues in the reception game of Clue meant that his family was far to stupid to follow the directions; a bride who demanded that all her bridesmaids weigh a minimum of 200 pounds in hopes that this would make her (the bride) the only pretty woman in the wedding party (no hope there, because mean is the ugliest thing on any person); and a psychobunny from the depths of perdition who crashed the bachelor party, socked a woman outside the club in the head because she just felt like hitting someone, is willing to change lanes into one going the wrong direction in order to avoid a) traffic and b) a bridesmaid trying to have a serious conversation with her, and will tomorrow night throw a hissey fit about chocolate cake that may put last season’s veil-ripping drama junkie to shame. Seriously, she’s going into her third week on the show while the other brides profiled thus far have only lasted one ep each. The standard is two episodes. I’m beginning to think Valerie may wind up being in every episode this season.

These people are making my hair itch.

There is, however, one WETV wedding-related show that I’m seriously enjoying. Amazing Wedding Cakes is a fun look behind the scenes at several different wedding cake designers/bakers across the US. Each week the viewer gets taken through the steps from initial client consultation to delivery of the finished product.

The fun is what happens in between. You get to see how the design is developed, how many hands get involved in creating each cake masterpiece, and sometimes even the fun of getting a multi-tier cake to the venue on time in a taxicab.

As a longtime cake junkie who makes ‘em tasty, but not that pretty, I’m fascinated by this show. I love watching the cakes come together, the in-jokes, the meltdowns in both buttercream and emotion, the pride taken in a job well done, and the frustrations when things don’t work out as planned.

Also, seriously, if you’ve hired someone to make an elaborate wedding cake for you, don’t try to change the design a couple days before the event. One bride called the bakery two days before her wedding just as the head designer was smoothing that gorgeous terra cotta colored fondant over the second tier of her cake to say she’d decided she wanted white instead.

Don’t do that to your baker. It’s Just Not Nice.

If you haven’t watched Amazing Wedding Cakes, be sure to check it out. It’s a lot of fun! (WETV Sunday, 10pm/9 Central). As they say: No guts, no ganache!

And on to Inspiration for Ashley #3!

My two nieces will be flower girls! I’m not sure about their dresses yet - I am thinking about HAWT PANK and SHAWKING PURPLE (they are two and almost 4, and SO SO CRAZY INTO PANK AND PURPLE) - but I know beyond doubt’s dark shadow that they will both be wearing silvery angel wings on their adorable little backs. Because what good is a wedding without little girls wearing angel wings?

As easy as this sounds, there are definitely more pastel flower girl dresses and white flower girl dresses than there are flower girl dresses in colors one could describe as either hawt or shocking. Luckily, a number of online dress shops offer all of their designs in custom fabric choices. In other words, if they carry the fabric, you can get a dress made from it.

Pegeen, for example, offers most of its flower girl dresses in any one of 200 colors. I believe the color above is called “Boing.”

(more…)

In honor of the new Star Trek movie, I have to let my geek flag fly and feature one Star Trek wedding cake and one Star Trek wedding cake topper that reader and friend oh_chris found on Cake Wrecks. While The Beard and I chose not to include the United Federation of Planets or Star Fleet in our nuptials, I can’t fault those who do because I harbor my own sci-fi fetishes (as does Twistie, I happen to know).

I especially like how nice a job the cake maker did with the Star Trek communicator tier. Sometimes themed cakes are done in such a slipshod way that you have to ask yourself why the baker even bothered to do anything other than stick a few of those pre-fab sugar thingies on. I’m guessing that the cake designer is a trekkie (or trekker, if you like) and was plenty pleased at that particular commission.

Though I’m not the world’s biggest wedding cake topper fan, since most of them are kind of cliched, but I have to say that I have a soft spot in my heart for original cake toppers, a la yesterday’s robot wedding cake toppers. So when I came across this DIY wedding cake topper kit from Goose Grease, I was at first smitten. It is, after all, only $8!

But then I started asking myself whether the individual components would be even less expensive and how well the toppers would turn out if the painter was less than painterly.

The seller will whip some up for you for $40, but honestly, I think I could do almost as good a job. YMMV where that is concerned. All in all, I like (not love or hate) the DIY wedding cake topper idea, but I have to wonder about the execution when one is using the above kit.

What say you?

Aren’t these cake toppers from The Builders Studio rad?

There are all kinds of cake toppers in the crafter’s Etsy shop, from elegant robots to secret agent robots to “Sky Captain Airplane Robot and Sexy Bride Bot Queen.” The only thing I did see was gay robot wedding cake toppers, but custom orders are accepted so it’s up to our homosexual brothers and sisters in matrimony to get the trend going!

We’ve posted about Legos within the context of marriage (sort of) here on the blog, but we’ve never given much space to Legos as they relate to weddings. There are, of course, Lego wedding cake toppers andLego wedding cakes made entirely of actual Legos, but Lego wedding cakes that are actually edible are few and far between. Here are two of the nicest I could find:

Photo by Norma Tub

If the construction theme isn’t for you, but you still want to incorporate Lego into your wedding cake, you could always do a stacked cake of different sizes and colors of Lego blocks or go entirely nuts and create a cake that is two three-foot-tall Lego people!

The lovely class-factotum sent me a link to this, er, interesting wedding cake:

While I understand that the truck is supposed to be off-roading its way up the side of the cake, the colors chosen to represent mud or a stream bed or whatever that’s supposed to be makes it seem as if the vehicle has spewed hot and dirty exhaust particles onto each tier as it made its way up toward the top. Soiled wedding cake? Trust me when I say that it’s never a good look.