A Woodside Wedding: Tower Of Cupcakes!

Immediately after the bouquet and garter tosses, it was time for CUPCAKES!

Our wedding cupcakes deserve their very own recap post, since Mr. Cola and I worked so hard to design and build the stand together, choose the flavors and frosting designs, and specify the precise layout of the cupcakes on our stand.

And here is our over-6-foot-tall beauty, in all it's yummy glory, on our wedding day!

And you know you want to see some detailed shots, so bring on the cupcake close ups! (Warning, try not to drool on your keyboard!)

(guest photo)

Our cupcakes were one of the biggest hits of the evening. Nobody could stop talking about them, and during dinner our guests were making bets, trying to guess how many there actually were (the highest guess I heard was 350, and the actual total was 385, counting the jumbo one at the top).

Guests even had a little too much fun posing with the cupcake tower, as you can see in the below 3 guest photos.

(Pretending to steal cupcakes, in blatant disregard of the signs, LOL!)

Now that you've seen the cupcakes and the stand, it's time for a play-by-play of our cupcake "cutting."

First, it's very important to weigh your options, which of the 5 flavors to try first?

I might be a little too excited about this!

I picked a vanilla cupcake with latte flavored frosting, and Mr. C went for the carrot cake.

Instead of an actual cutting, we had decided to just feed each other a bite of a mini cupcake. So taking the wrapper off first was an important step!

"Ready for this? Remember, the deal was no smashing, unless you wanted to pay for my makeup artist to stay the whole night!"

Getting the cupcake in Mr. C's mouth AND trying to watch the cupcake coming toward my mouth was a lot harder than it looks!

Nom nom nom!

I then gave Mr. Cola a frosting flavored kiss.

And as I brought my arm down, I bumped his cupcake with my elbow.

So I made him lick the frosting off, natch!

I must say, I was pretty pleased with myself for that sly move!

Then, we took a step back, and the cupcake stand was SWARMED! Mr. Cola said it was the only part of the night that he didn't feel like the center of attention, and so he took the opportunity to duck away. I ended up standing there for a while, repeating the cupcake flavors, all the while just trying to finish my half cupcake still in my hand from our "cutting."

(Nobody could take just one!)

We only had a couple kids at our wedding, and they begged for the giant cupcake at the top, so we let them have it. We weren't planning on saving it anyway, not when we can get fresh, not freezer burned cupcakes from the same bakery on our anniversary!

At the end of the night we still had plenty of cupcakes left over for the Sunday luncheon (which we had planned on), and our DOC even sent a small box of cupcakes with us back to the hotel that night, which I munched on for breakfast the next day.

What are you serving your guests for dessert? Any other cupcake fans out there?

Miss any wedding week details? Catch up here:

- I packed an emergency bag that saved my dress
- We had a crazy 4 days prepping for house guests and stuffing favors
- Shopping for a ton of wedding flowers to arrange ourselves
- Mr. Cola drinks a 40 and I have a night out on the town for our low-key bach parties
- A day of DIY'ing flower arrangements
- I kicked off our official recaps with my #1 wedding tip
- We began the weekend festivities with a sunset cruise for our wedding party
- We rehearsed our quick and easy ceremony
- I panicked, but we got our rehearsal dinner decorations set up just in time
- Our families met for the first time at our rehearsal dinner under the trees
- What went wrong on our wedding day, and my tips for future brides
- My bridesmaids and I got our hair and makeup done in the hotel suite
- I put on my wedding dress and became a bride
- The guys watched the World Cup, then got ready in 10 minutes
- Traffic delayed our decorations getting to the venue, and I almost ruined our first look
- We got to see each other for the first time on our wedding day at our first look
- We took some time for bride and groom pictures in the park
- I gave you a behind the scenes look at our family, friends and DOC setting up our venue
- Arriving at our venue and getting ready for the ceremony to start
- Everyone walked down the aisle
- Excerpts from our ceremony, and reading the vows we wrote for each other
- I interrupted our officiant, we exchanged rings, and with a kiss we were officially married!
- Wedding party and family portraits, and my thoughts on missing pictures
- Our guests enjoyed cocktail hour while we took a few more photos
- Everyone ate a delicious dinner, and our siblings gave beautiful toasts
- We didn't practice, but we had a very special and wonderful first dance as husband and wife
- I showed you some disposable camera pictures, which were totally worth it to include on our tables!
- I found a target and tossed my bouquet at her
- Mr. Cola finally managed to find my garter under my dress and tossed it

(Unless otherwise noted, all photos in this post were taken by the very talented photographers of Shoot Me Now Photography)

Have Your (Cup)Cake, Part 2: Our Guests Will Nom Nom Them Too!

In my last cupcake post I discussed how our tasting went well, although we had to come up with a new plan for the quantity we'd order and new decorations that wouldn't be an added charge.

So back at the drawing board that is Adobe Illustrator, I took out our "bird's eye view" drawing of the shelves of our cupcake tower, which I'd originally created to see how many cupcakes we needed to fill the tower. I'd thought 18 dozen mini and 9 dozen regular sized cupcakes would be perfect, but we learned from Sibby's Cupcakery that using a mix of minis and regulars, we'd likely only go through 8 dozen and 7 dozen, respectively.

So I switched things up, and laid the shelves out again, this time with all mini cupcakes! They looked great too, and we were even able to cut some out, since we decided we didn't need ones on the back side of the bottom levels, as it would be up against a wall anyway. (For those of you who missed it the first time, here are the links to part 1, 2 and 3 of my posts about Mr. Cola and I building our 6 foot tall cupcake stand).

Here is the new layout of where the mini cupcakes will go on each shelf, with room left at the corners for flowers. (The original of this didn't have colors, just place holder circles, but after deciding on the designs, I went back and prettied it up for you! Click for a larger version of the picture.)


And after we'd decided we were going with all mini cupcakes, we could solidify the designs and flavors. Which I of course mocked up for you all to get a visual! On the left is the inspiration decoration from Sibby's website, and on the right is my mock up in our colors.

Carrot Cinnamon flavor with 2 yellow candy flowers and 1 purple candy flower:


Latte Love flavor with coffee flavored frosting and lavender polka dots:


Snickerdoodle flavor with a sage green ribbon stripe and butter yellow polka dots on the ribbon:


Red Velvet flavor with 2 purple candy flowers and 1 yellow candy flower:


Grandma's Chocolate Tea flavor with a lavender bow:


It all works out to 32 dozen total mini cupcakes, with two flavors/designs per shelf, alternating for visual interest. That's 384 cupcakes, and still way more than we really need for the reception. But our cupcake tower will look full and pretty (a priority!), and I'm hoping our guests will eat more of the minis than they would if there were regular sized ones available, since minis will make it easier to try more flavors. If each guest eats 3 at the reception, then we'll still have 84 left over; plenty for dessert at the Sunday luncheon!

And in case you're still having trouble visualizing how it will come together on our wedding day, with the 6 foot cupcake tower, 5 cupcake flavors and flowers for decorations, here is a mock up of the front two rows of cupcakes on a photo of the tower (click the image to see it bigger):


Sigh! It looks so good, and I just know it's going to look a hundred times better in real life. I hope our guests will love it. I think this is becoming one of my favorite parts of our whole wedding!

What is or was YOUR favorite detail of your wedding?

Have Your (Cup)Cake, Part 1: Yes, We're Gonna Eat 'Em Too!

We had our cupcake tasting, and it went well!

But before I go into the details, I want to first share some gorgeous cupcake designs with you all. I love looking at the many cake inspiration pictures, but these little pieces of lovely are so cute I want to die!


{Source of all of the above are from the very talented Icing Dreams in Toronto}

And just for the hive, have a look at these adorable Bee cupcakes!


{Source of Bee cupcakes from Flickr}

I especially loved the cherry blossom and leaf designs in the last picture from Icing Dreams, and it was one of several photos I took with us to Sibby's Cupcakery for our tasting.

In preparation of our tasting, we got to select four flavors of cupcakes to try (since they're baked fresh just for us for the tasting). On our negative one year wedding anniversary, last June, we'd gotten the Sibby's sampler mix of 24 mini cupcakes, so we already had some favorite flavors in mind. So for the tasting we picked two favorites and two new flavors: Carrot Cinnamon, Latte Love, Red Velvet, and Snickerdoodle.

Mr. Cola and I each got four minis to try, one of each flavor, and while it was a struggle to let myself eat half of each one while on my diet, they were oh so good! Seriously. Sibby's cupcakes are better than any wedding cake I've ever eaten!


(the rest of the photos in this post were taken by me)

There were also some other flavors on hand to try if we wanted to, shown on one of their pretty stands that are available for rent.


While we nom nom nommed, we discussed the quantity of cupcakes and design ideas. I showed off a picture of our 6 foot tall cupcake stand, on which we'd planned to put 18 dozen minis and 9 dozen regular cupcakes. However, based on Sibby's formula, for 100 guests we would only really need about 8 dozen minis and 7 dozen regular! Whoops! And then when it came to the designs, we discovered that all my lovely, intricate designs would be an added cost. Saddness! But understandable; those designs have got to take a long time!

In the end we came up with some really great decoration ideas that won't cost anything extra, and will look fabulous on our stand, which I'll share in my next post (along with PhotoShop mock ups :) ). We finished half of our cupcakes and left happy and full, looking forward to receiving our proposal from Sibby's in a day or two.


(The remnants of our tasting. On the way there, Mr. Cola had jokingly wondered if they'd give us milk with our cupcakes, and he was very happy when they did!)

Since we only ate half our cupcakes, we took the rest home in a cute little box for later, and we had enough restraint to wait two days before diplomatically agreeing on who got which ones. ("I know you want the carrot cake one, so if you get that one, I get the latte one, okay...?")


Coming up next I'll share how we decided to balance the number of cupcakes we needed with the number we wanted (to make our stand look awesome), and which flavors and designs we picked!

Have you gone to your cake or cupcake tasting yet?