Dan and Michelle's Wedding Cake

The gorgeous bride, Michelle, asked us to make a vegan wedding cake and cupcakes to celebrate her and Dan's special day. It was our first vegan request. We searched for a few recipes for both chocolate and vanilla cakes and frostings, modified the recipes to taste and ran multiple kitchen tests to finally get the best combination. We were a tad skeptical on how vegan baking would work, but to our pleasant surprise, everything came out perfectly! Of course, the wedding consultation would not be complete without a complimentary cake tasting for the bride and the groom...and a few of our co-workers (we had to taste them, too)! Alas, we settled on the recipes that we will forever keep in our secret baking book.

This was also the largest order we've had to date. Besides hours of baking and hours of decorating, we also spent hours on building a cupcake stand out of scratch! We were able to find different size pre-cut round wood pieces at a local cake decorating shop and bought a long board of MDF from Home Depot, which we cut into pieces.

(This is Amelia cutting with a kiddo saw attached to a stabilization board. She sure knows how to use a power saw!)

When all the cutting and drilling was complete, we painted all pieces white with Sherwin-Williams Duration Home Interior Acrylic Latex environmentally-preferred paint (It's GreenSure designation - low VOC and low odor formula).

We pre-made all the edible decorations that matched their wedding colors (black, white, green, and purple) and themes (calla lilies, orchids, roses, and lucky bamboo) a week in advance and had them completed by the morning of the wedding. Are we procrastinators? No, we both hold full-time job, so please forgive us :-)

On Thursday evening, we baked a 8-inch cake for the topper. The next day, we baked 100 cupcakes and covered the cake with fondant. Then we loaded all the delicious cakes/cupcakes and all he supplies we needed to complete the centerpiece at the venue in a car and drove to Albany, Ore. for a night. On a bright and early Saturday morning, we drove to The Inn at Diamond Woods in Monroe, Ore. for the Bowden's wedding ceremony and reception.

When we arrived there, we anticipated working in a kitchen or least a large countertop space to make the fresh frosting for the cupcakes. The event coordinators directed us to a small corner in the reception area where the cake would actually be set on a display table. There wasn't a lot of working space, so Amelia took a chair from the reception space outside to place her vibrant red Kitchen Aid stand mixer to make all the frosting (a bit of flour, powdered sugar and cocoa all spilled onto the floor to eventually get cleaned), while Clarissa struggled to assemble the cake stand (the holes on boards didn't align properly - blame Amelia's bad drilling skills!)

We glued all the ribbon bows onto the cupcake liners, placed a decoration on each of them and arranged them on the stand. The centerpiece turned out perfectly, despite our race against the clock (3.5 hours! It was completed 20 minutes before the wedding ceremony started). We felt like we were on Food Network's Cupcake Wars, sans the camera and judges.

Amelia is such a sweet-tooth person. Naturally, she isn't a huge fan of specialty desserts, but she was proven wrong in this case! The couple said earlier, nobody would notice the difference, it was indeed true! We were able to trick their guests into thinking these were regular cupcakes, the carb-loaded ones, and for us, that was a great sense of relief and success!

Thank you Dan and Michelle for having us to be a part of your wedding! We were absolutely honored to make an important centerpiece for your special day.