Let Them Eat Cake

** I was right in the middle of planning my wedding in 2007. It was a shock to learn that weddings seemed to be more about commerce than love**

I’ve come to find that planning a wedding is less about love and more about how to scam people out of money. Movies have crammed little girl’s heads with impossible dreams of unicorns and ice sculptures and now they just can’t live without a chocolate fountain on Their Big Day!

Also, I now understand the concept of a “non-refundable deposit”. It turns out that it’s so overwhelming and expensive to plan a wedding that anyone who truly knew what they were getting into would hop the next flight to Vegas. So what if most people frown on the impromptu nuptials? Who cares, at least you’ll be sane. And not broke. But the wedding industry has figured this out, and that’s why they created the “non-refundable deposit” to chain you to the wedding of your dreams weather you like it or not! Elvis is beginning to sound better and better. He’s an icon, right? What’s not to love?

I have tried to be a reasonable bride (if there is such a thing) and use the phrase “It’s My Day!” as sparingly as possible. I have also subscribed to the Martha Stewart School of Planning and have organized my entire wedding into color coded sections of a bridal notebook that has “Rebekah’s Wedding Organizer” embroidered on the front. Don’t Judge. I have immersed myself in learning the proper protocol and etiquette for every bridal occasion and decision. It’s my opinion that some of these traditions are really fun and some are dumb as shit. For example:

Fun: Being fawned over and showered with champagne while trying on designer gowns.

D.A.S.: Hot-gluing Life-Savers all over a t-shirt that says “Suck for a Buck” and expecting the bride to wear it in public for her bachelorette party. WTF?

Ok, so another wedding tradition that I am really not a fan of is the Wedding Cake. I know it’s important to a lot of women, just not this one. Number one, I don’t like cake. Number two, I especially don’t like super expensive cake. So I was planning on having a plain cake that wasn’t crazy expensive just to say I did it, but frankly, I didn’t care if we had one or not. I heard that Publix made a pretty mean wedding cake and luckily there was one right by the Ritz that we were getting married at. I knew it wouldn’t be expensive and so this was going to be a perfect solution and I mentally checked it off the list.

When we went to the Ritz for our first tasting we also met with our wedding planner and I casually mentioned that we would be bringing in our own cake. She said that would be “no problem at all” but that there would be a small fee charged to have the staff cut and serve any cake that was not made by the Ritz bakery. I figured that we would still come out on top since the Publix cake was such a steal. I gave the go ahead and didn’t think anything of it until the end of the meeting I thought to ask how much that “small fee” would be?

“Six Dollars” she replied. I’m thinking: “wow, $6 that’s it? Man, everyone thinks the Ritz is so overpriced but that’s just not true, look how reasonable this is...” “Per person” she continued. Um, WHAT?!?!! So, it’s an ADDITIONAL $6 per person on TOP of the cost of the cake just to have someone slice it?? I’m doing the math here and we are having 150 guests and at $6 per person you are telling me that it will be NINE HUNDRED FREAKIN U.S. DOLLARS JUST TO CUT THE CAKE?!?!?!?!!?!?!?!?

No effing way.

After I reattached my head to my body from where it had blown off, I asked about the other options. She said that their Ritz-Carlton Bakery could prepare a beautiful, one of a kind, wedding cake that would be a culinary and visual masterpiece! They would fly in a world renowned German Chocolatier, the Queen of England’s Personal Pastry Chef and only use the eggs from virgin baby chick’s who have been specially bred for just this cake…. or at least that’s what you would assume she had said based on the fact that the Ritz-Carlton cake was $16 per person!!!! SIXTEEN! PER PERSON! For 150 guests that math works out to be a $2,400 cake!!! (It's not possible to use enough exclamation points to convey the ridiculousness!!!!)

Are. You. Kidding. Me.

Hell no. There is just no way that I am going to pay twenty-four-hundred-dollars for a wedding cake that I didn’t even want in the first place! Absolutely not. No. So, after I very calmly told the planner that I would sooner pay $2,400 for pile of dirty socks and that no cake on earth is worth that much money, I decided that we would just not have a cake at all. If I was going to spend money on a dessert I was at least going to have something that I would actually eat. We ended up serving a Molten Chocolate Lava Cake with Chocolate Mouse and a Raspberry Gelee instead of cake. And you know what? No one even missed it.