(FYI: Today is the last day to enter the Wedding Planning Book 4-Pack Giveaway! It’s easy to enter, and the prizes make for some good reading!)

Classy, zow...

In my opinion, if you’re a grownup person, there’s nothing wrong with drinking or even getting a little (or a lot) drunk. Whether or not to drink and to drink to excess is the choice every adult has to make on their own. As long as it’s done responsibly and you don’t upchuck on my stuff, more power to you. And drinking at weddings is all right, too. But if getting falling down drunk is such a big part of your life that you feel the need to incorporate it into your wedding theme? That’s a little… less than classy, shall we say. It’s like one step above a cake topper featuring the groom holding the bride’s hair while she worships the porcelain deity. Since I prefer classy weddings to weddings on the opposite end of the spectrum, I’m going with HATE on this one. How about you? What would you first impression be if you encountered this wedding cake topper in the wild?

Via Cake Toppers to Top It All

I was totally going to try to prank you – tell you I was getting married again, well, me and The Beard really, because we’re polygamists and we want to be true to ourselves and the world. But then I thought, nah, you’d never believe me because if I was getting married again I’d be showing you 800000 photos of all the things I’d want to include in my polygamist wedding. So instead of a prank, I give you this:

Twins?

What do you think? Cute or meh?

A while back – can you tell I’ve been a bit behind with everything? – Dress My Cupcake sent me some of their colorful cupcake wrappers to check out. Before I got the samples, cupcake wrappers were already on my radar – cupcakes are still a pretty popular wedding cake alternative, but those crinkly paper cups don’t have much going for them.

In fact, I checked out some DIY cupcake wrapper templates last year thinking I’d use them for La Paloma’s birthday cupcakes. But it turns out that regular old computer paper makes for a pretty lousy cupcake wrapper.

What’s nice about the cupcake wrappers from Dress My Cupcake is that they’re more substantial that anything I’d made at home on the cheap – and there are textured wrappers, too, which I definitely couldn’t have made myself. At least not without a bunch of glue and buttons and things. There are a ton of colors and themes, so there’s bound to be cupcake wrappers that match your wedding colors.

Cupcake wrappers from Dress My Cupcake cost about $1 per for the basics, and then there are fancier options. Dress My Cupcake also carried a bunch of cupcake accessories, like cupcake favor boxes and cupcake display stands.

Aren’t they pretty?

I’m disappointed to say that while I tried to make photo-worthy cupcakes to wrap in my sample cupcake wrappers, I failed miserably. Sure, my cupcakes were delish, but they were ugly and not worth wrapping. Hence the stock photos.

The beautiful people at Donsuemor sent me a sweet challenge: In exchange for a sample box of their madeleines, they wanted me to think of all the ways you could use them in a wedding. Now am I really going to think of ALL the ways? Er, I think that would get a little more offbeat than I want to get. But I can think of plenty of fun wedding-y things to do with Donsuemor madeleines! (Which, I should add, are excellent. Madeleines are actually my favorite cookies, so I have pretty high standards. And La Paloma? She is still sad that we ate through the samples.)

Omigosh. Madeleines on a wedding cake. It’s like two of my favorite things are rubbing up against each other in some sort of delicious dance. I can’t decide if I’d tried to get cake and cookie in a single bite, or if I’d eat the madeleines first. Donsuemor has five kinds of madeleine, so brides and grooms shouldn’t run into flavor fatigue.

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You can’t deny that wedding cake tends to be a bit fussy, with lots and lots of detailing. Wedding cake isn’t just wedding cake anymore – it’s a centerpiece and it’s expected to be a wedding showstopper with as much personality as the bride’s gown. But what if you’re just not a fussy kind of chick and you’re part of a very unfussy couple? I recommend looking into more modern wedding cakes, a la these beauties from Sweet Sweets Cake Art.

Aren’t they just gorgeous? But you definitely can’t call them fussy or busy (even if they might stop the show, just for a moment). For a more thorough look at just how the wedding cake became what it is today, I recommend checking out Wedding Cakes and Cultural History by Simon R. Charsley. It’s a bit of an academic read, but so deliciously thorough.

Some couples take wedding cake smooshing for granted, and what’s worse, take it for granted that their better halves share their opinions on wedding cake smashing. A little icing up your nose won’t hurt anyone, of course, but it sure can do a number on the bride’s makeup job, indelibly dye a white wedding dress, or cause the groom to lose the security deposit on his rental. Every tried to get icing out of an updo?

And even though some brides and grooms don’t care about their clothes of makeup or hair, those same people may simply not want a handful of wedding cake smashed into their faces. Not at a wedding, not ever.

Look like fun? Maybe, maybe not. If they’re both into it, then dandy. I went looking for opinions about wedding cake smashing on message boards and elsewhere, and reactions to it ran the gamut from childish to hilarious. One reaction I found compared wedding cake smooshing to a slap in the face! I wouldn’t go that far, but I will admit that I asked The Beard NOT to smash and did not smash cake on his face. My stylist was in attendance, and I think he would have felt compelled to redo my makeup. Plus, getting dirty just isn’t my thing.

So personally, I won’t advocate for or against wedding cake smashing, but I will recommend that all brides and grooms – even those who consider themselves very easygoing – bring up the subject in advance of the reception so they and their new spouse will be on the same page when it comes time to cut the cake.

Photo by David Christensen

Omigosh omigosh omigosh, how amazing and inspirational is this travel inspired dessert buffet created bySweets Indeed and featured on the Amy Atlas Events blog? I think it has everything in the whole world that I like, from a casual, almost-but-not-quite rustic design to its incredible whimsy and prettiness. Oh, and sugarsugarsugar*, but that goes without saying.

On the Amy Atlas Events blog, Amy herself shares a few tips and tricks that will help the DIYers out there create an incredible dessert buffet. Speaking as someone who recently discovered that she likes designing the look and feel of events, I’d wager that something like a candy buffet or dessert buffet would be a relatively simple project. Much less stressful than, say, baking a wedding cake or sewing a wedding dress.

*my drug of choice