Wedding cake rant

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Theresa

Theresa

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Aug 30, 2006
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Amanda
www.bloomingflowers.net
State / Prov
OH
The wedding cake fell apart in transit.

At the scene I felt really sorry for the baker.

Now for the rant.

I am supposed to decorate the cake with flowers. I set up my reception table stuff and wait around for cake, which shows up in crumbles. Baker manages to salvage top part. We go to Meijer to purchase cake. Come back to the reception hall and the baker takes my good flower cutters and cuts 1/4 inch dowels. I designed my flowers to be light weight, so they could set on top or cake. ugh. She cuts 5 dowels for cake.

Then baker is complaining that she has so far to travel with cake. Ah, I had ice packs around my flowers...she didn't have anything, but stacked the cake and transported it in her trunk. Asking for trouble? The icing was made mostly of Crisco. I have never seen a soft icing like this used on cake, but didn't say anything.

So anyways, I stick around 2 hours to decorate bought cake with fresh flowers. Turned out ok, not great. I didn't mind staying around....I'm mad about my cutters!

Any suggestions for dealing with Wedding Cake Bakers?

thanks for bearing with me, sorry for the rant.
cheers!
 
Oh my, what a nightmare. I'm sure the baker was super stressed, as any one of us would have been. As for the cutters, you helped in what was clearly an "emergency" and I would have done the same. The soft icing - I don't know about baking, but I've seen a lot of different icings, from whipped cream to heavy fondant. I don't think soft icing is out of the ordinary.

I think you handled it fine - it sounds like you were available to wait the extra time, which is fortunate. Do you think the bride ever found out?

You could contact the bakery prior to the event, to set up a time ... but I don't think in this case anything would have ended up differently for you - you still would have been sitting there waiting for the cake to be reconstructed.

Hope you at least had a piece of the broken crumbles while you were waiting!

tracy
 
Transported in her trunk? Stacked the cake...meaning that the cake was already assembled?? In her trunk??? This seems to be an excellent example of why such things should be left to experts. You seem to have been the only expert there.
 
Connie said:
Transported in her trunk? Stacked the cake...meaning that the cake was already assembled?? In her trunk??? This seems to be an excellent example of why such things should be left to experts. You seem to have been the only expert there.
Click to expand...


Ditto! That's the first thing that jumped out at me... in the TRUNK!!! What on earth was she thinking!?!?!

V
 
Thanks for the kind words ladies...yes I ate cake out of her trunk! I guess it's time to laugh it off. Next time I'll pack my own fork.

smiles, Theresa
 
Florist to the rescue!!

Here's my cake story:
I got to the country club and set up the wedding - no problem.
Cake lady not there, so I wait. After a bit, this woman comes up to me very distraught, kinda deer in the headlights looking. She asks if I am the florist and can I help her because she has a problem. She says that the cake slipped in transit, that she is on painkillers, she got lost and someone ran her off the road. Ok all I heard was "painkillers" !!??!! As I go to see the cake I pass some off the staff rolling their eyes in disbelief. It was 4 teirs, stacked, fondant icing with chocolate filling. Yes she attempted to deliver it assembled. Her helper kept giving me looks as if to say help me or take me away from this lady. My guess is it slid or she dropped it. Anyway, she wheels it into the walkin cooler of the kitchen. She's crying as she is rubbing the icing to smooth it out but the chocolate filling has oozed out and the white icing is now kinda beige. I suggest to just go to Safeway and buy something, anything. No they don't want to do that! So I go back to my shop grab a couple of buckets of flowers and supplies. I pass the church where the wedding is, they're done & getting ready to go to the reception. I get back to the walk-in, she's still crying. Tears all over the icing. (are people actually gonna eat this?
I put a band of ribbon on each teir (to hide the chocolate) and cover the "cake" with flowers. I kept getting updates like, "they're here & the mother of the bride wants to know where the cake is". Finally I finish and it looks beautiful, not the cake she wanted with just a few tulips gracefully layed on it but still beautiful. They wheel out the cake and I sneak out the back.

So now I always ask, who is doing the cake ? And I tell them that if their cake looks differently then we planned it is most likely hiding something.
I also have stated in their contract: Your cake must be in place at time of floral delivery.

The moral of this story: Make sure your cake person is a professional and not on PAINKILLERS!!

Jennifer
 
I think we all have horror stories about cakes. I don't know how many crooked cakes I've had to even up. I've taken pictures before and after just in case the bride or mom comes back to me about the cake & flowers...
I have never seen a numerous tiered cake/pedestal cake brought in all put together. I guess our cake makers are more careful in this little town!!
 
Who delivers cake pre assemble on different level. Seems to be these people are not the proffesionals around.
I would also help as much as I can but would not be reasponsible for any lawsuit after.....
Luc
 
Been there . . . done that . . .

Story 1:

We used to have a "society" baker who worked for a local restaurant and was known as "the" baker to use if you wanted your event to be eligible for chatter among the "see and be seen" crowd.

Got a call one Saturday afternoon. A bride (not ours, even) was in a panic. Seems that said hotsy totsy baker had delivered her cake . . . in pieces. He brought it in like that. It had fallen apart on the ride over. I think it may have even been assembled during transit but don't know for sure. Story was that the baker burst into tears, told his sad story, threw up his hands, AND LEFT. Naturally, he had collected well in advance.

Anyway, feeling sorry for the bride who was from out of town, a couple of us gathered up a few items from a gourmet kitchen which we operated at the time (even though our baker was already off for the weekend) and went over to see what we could do. We put the cake back together as best we could, respread the icing, replaced the flowers, and made a couple of hundred bucks from a grateful bride and groom. Gotta say I was right proud of the professional looking cake we created from this mess, considering neither one of us had ever baked or decorated a wedding cake in our lives. We did have an edge in that we had observed our kitchen staff doing it a few times, though.

No. I don't know if they got their money back but I do know that said baker lived to screw up again.

Story 2:

Same hotsy totsy "society" baker. Seems that just before the wedding said "baker" had accepted a job with a new restaurant who wouldn't allow him to use their equipment for his private jobs. So he "resigned" his position as their wedding baker, even though he had been paid in full for the job. Didn't offer to refund the money, either.

As it was one of our weddings . . . we rounded up a more stable and reliable baker who came through admirably at the last minute and did a magnificent job.

And the baker did return the money on this job. But only after the bride's father threatened to dissect him or worse. And I'm pretty sure he meant it.

Story 3:

Outdoor wedding. Reception by the river at a large horse farm. Beautiful setting. Totally different baker delivers cake in a professional manner. Sets up and leaves. We're to decorate with flowers.

Problem was that the cake was large, heavy, warm, and had been set up on a round table on slightly uneven ground. And the table was slightly tilted. The warm cake started migrating to the downhill side. We noticed it while decorating other tables. We notified the caterer who did nothing. Like us, his contract excluded him from any liability for "cake" problems and he refused to touch other people's cakes.

Well . . . we watched this warm tiered cake slowly migrate to one side kinda like the Leaning Tower of Pizza. We put off decorating as long as we could cause we kinda wanted it to fall apart before we touched it if it was going to. But, as we had finished everything else, the point of no return had arrived. What to do?

Two of us very gently picked up the cake table, cake and all, and rotated it 180 degrees. The warm cake now was pretty much perpindicular to gravity, if not the ground. So we decorated it, took our pictures, and got the heck out of there. It survived the reception and the bride loved it. Bride never knew. Caterer told the baker who was very grateful.

Aren't weddings fun ? ? ?
 
We too have done several cakes where we thought "what was the bride thinking - hiring this person?"

Tackiest one was late, brought the cake as the wedding party and all the guests were arriving then proceded to FAN her business cards around the base of the cake like a ruffle........

fondest -my cousin married a baker who baked his own cake (still does some of the best cakes around) very warm day, with raspberry filling and two stacked layers started doing a slow slide to the table. Here is the groom in all his finery fixing the cake in the middle of dinner. Everyone laughed and we still talk about it at get togethers.
 
My worst was a new bakery in town about 10 years ago that got the order for a large 4 tiered cake for a prominent and fussy family. I knew the baker didn't have much experience but she sure didn't lack in confidence. The bride ordered lots of flowers (all hot pink, orange, yellow and purple) for the cake. She told me she was also have hot pink frosting scrolling, etc. done by the baker. I told her I'd advise not putting pink frosting on the cake as it may not match the hot pink roses and that the flowers would provide plenty of color. So she calls the baker and switches it to white and ivory frosting only. I get to the reception and find the cake lady is gone and I'm looking at a crooked white cake with red frosting. I find the lady's phone number and call. She said she's not coming back. I told her she probably didn't know this family like I do, but for her business sake she'd better.
She arrives and tells me that she didn't know how dark of a pink to make it so left it alone without adding white which made it look red. I told her I thought it was supposed to be just white and ivory and that she'd been called. She did recall that but forgot to note it. So she starts scraping off the red and tells me to help. It is now smearing all over the place. She had pearl strings all over which sucked up the red on the strings and couldn't go back on either. I was disgusted that she actually wiped off the frosting occassionally with her finger and was licking her fingers! The cake still looked terrible but better. The flowers covered alot of sins. Long story longer, the bride was still furious and got half her money back and the baker closed shortly after.
 
These stories are fun!

1. I did an anniversary party once where the cake baker, a relative of the anniversary couple, brought in a couple of iced layers and set them down. He then announced that the other layers had burned and this was all that he had. The celebrating couple's grandchildren went to a local grocery cake and bought several white, but not decorated except for the white icing, birthday cakes. One of the granddaughters mentioned that the grocery clerk had brought them out of their freezer. They remained so frozen that the knife was broken when someone tried to slice one of the cakes.

2. At an outdoor wedding, it was so hot that even under the tent where the food was being set up for the reception, the chocolate icing from the wedding cake melted off the cake. The bride and groom had to rush to make pictures of their cutting of the cake while there was still some icing on the cake.
 
My favorite is when we were at a venue that had two different halls and the cake lady's husband set up the cake in the wrong hall. We know this business owner and she called us and said would you p-l-e-a-s-e move the cake from hall A to hall B. Our normal policy is that we don't touch the cake. We don't adjust, move, etc the actual cake in any way. We only add flowers.

Since this gal was a friend we sucked it up and did it but I HATED it every second. Thinking about this now makes me thing she still owes me! LOL!

Wanda
 
You guys don't even want to know the stupid thing I did. This was back in 1978, my first marriage, I thought I could do a lot of things myself. Boy, was I stupid! Against the advice of the baker, Just Desserts in San Francisco, I decided I wanted to transport my OWN cake to the reception site. I can't remember why... probably didn't want to pay transportation to and from (about 35 mi. each way), and I just LOVED their carrot cake. So anyway, I did this really horrendously stupid thing.. driving the cake in the back seat of my '65 Mustang (yep, no AC). By the time I got it to the reception location, it was sliding around, and I was in tears. Luckily, a couple of the caterer's ladies worked on it, and patched it up for me.

So so stupid.

Beth :~/
 
LOL, thanks Theresa. No, I sold the Mustang in about 1986 or so. It was to the point of needing a lot of mechanical work, so I got me a new Honda instead.

Beth :~)
 
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