Weddingbee boards

OK, disclaimer - we haven't had the wedding yet, so I don't know how things will go on the big day or how much our guests will like the cake. However, I felt obliged to post.

Tonight we found our wedding cake baker. She's not in a wedding bakery. She's not in any kind of bakery, actually. Her name is Rachelle, and she's at The Q Shack in Raleigh.

We decided to have The Q Shack cater our reception (with fancy items from their "special catering" menu rather than with barbecue) before the end of our first meeting with the owner, Tom. He was extremely down-to-earth and the food was delicious, so we hired him on the spot. When we asked who he'd recommend for wedding cakes, he said that his in-house baker could make our cake for around $2.50 per person. Um, WHAT? That is a BANANAS price for wedding cakes. He let us sample her work in the form of a red velvet cupcake, which was totally phenomenal. It didn't take us long to make an appointment to meet with her.

Tom emailed two days ago to ask for flavor preferences. Since he left it totally open-ended, we sent an email with our preferred cake flavors - one chocolate with raspberry, one vanilla with almond. We showed up tonight and she'd baked a little 8" cake of each kind. And they were really damn delicious. Like, WAY better than anything we tasted at the giant wedding show we attended a few weeks back. And when we told her about our ideas for decorating, she took off running with them, making improvements we'd never thought of. She told us that our flavor and display ideas were pretty much unlimited (except for fondant, which she doesn't use due to its difficulty to work with and general grossness of taste). Oh, and also? She made us a mini wedding cake out of three different sized cupcakes. Just because she had extra batter and thought it would be fun to do.

So... basically, Rachelle is off the chain. If you need a little cake or some cupcakes or even oh, I don't know, a wedding cake? Get in touch. She's awesome.

Oh my god! I'm totally getting my cake from her too!

Here are some pictures of the cakes:

Without all the fondant, they may not look like the most gorgeous cakes ever, but I can assure you they were the most delicious wedding cakes we've ever had, and they looked beautiful in our Science Museum reception location.

We cannot recomment Rachelle highly enough.

@Pendleton:  If you don't have a photographer yet, you could check out Rebecca Fougerousse at Red Fern Photography. We got eight hours of coverage with about 500 photos for $1000. You can see some of what she did for us here:

http://redfernphotographync.com/2012/04/gretchen-jason-raleigh-wedding-raleigh-little-theatre-museum-of-natural-science/