Wedding Cake Tasting - Buttercream & Queen of Cakes

Last Wednesday, Jeff and I had our first two (of three) wedding cake tastings. My mom, my dad, and my brother all came along to help out.

Our first stop was Buttercream, which is one of the best-rated cake places in Minnesota. Tasting the cake, you could see why. They gave us a small piece of about eight different kinds of cake (so we each got about one bite of each flavor), including - almond praline, bailey's chocolate, chocolate truffle, connecticut carrot, lemon rasberry, rasberry chocolate diva, and rasberry royale, and neopolitan (this had a strawberry cream cheese filling). They were all really good, but we especially liked the rasberry royale (a white cake with fresh raspberry filling), the rasberry chocolate diva (chocolate cake with fresh raspberry filling), and the almond praline. My dad also really liked the neopolitan cake. We'll probably choose two flavors for the actual cake. The buttercream cakes were all really moist, and none of them were too sweet. I don't usually like desserts all that much, but I thought all of these were really good.

The taste of the cake is definitely important, but I'm actually really excited about the way the cake will look. We took pictures of a bunch of cakes that we really liked. We could do the ones with the ribbon in a yellow that matched our colors, and if we end up doing an invitation that has curlicues, we could send them a copy of the design, and they could match that style on the cake - pretty cool. In general, Jeff and I liked the more sleek looking cakes.

The second tasting was at Queen of Cakes - another top-rated cake place. The people helping us at Queen of Cakes were really nice. They gave each of us a small platter, so we each got our own piece of each of about eight cakes. It was a ton of cake!

The cakes were all really good, though I don't think they were quite as moist as the ones at Buttercream, and they also seemed to be a bit more sweet, which is less my style. But we did have a good time trying everything - we especially liked the lemon cake and the German chocolate cake. The triple berry mousse filling was really good, and so was the chocolate mousse. At Queen of Cakes, they said they could do a different flavor for each tier of the cake. Also, Queen of Cakes generally makes a smaller main cake and then has sheet cake for the additional servings, while Buttercream doesn't do sheet cake at all.

There were a few really cute cakes we liked - especially one we saw that had things written out in frosting - very cute!