Congratulations on your engagement! As a husband and wife-owned business, here at Silver Rose Bakery, we LOVE love, and creating beautiful one-of-a-kind wedding cakes is one of our favorite things to do. Whether you have a wedding planner, day-of-coordinator, or you’re doing it all yourself, we’re here for you. We’ve baked for weddings of all sizes, from backyard or courthouse elopements to extravagant 400 – 500 guest events at multi-site venues. We’ve got you covered.
We like to think that next to the dress, the cake is the star of the show. We kid…mostly. I mean, everyone at the wedding gets a piece of it. Everyone sees it when they walk into the reception. Everyone has something to say about it. It’s gotta be good, right? So, when should you start meeting with your wedding cake bakery? Let’s talk about that.
It does depend on where you’re getting married, but here in Phoenix, where we’ve won the couple’s choice award every year since 2018, we recommend that you meet with your wedding cake bakery 3-4 months before the wedding. If you’re planning a larger wedding and want a dessert table, plus a wedding cake, shoot for 5-6 months. If you’re planning a smaller wedding and just a beautiful cake will suffice, still stick to those 3-4 months, because Arizona is a hot spot for weddings and those dates will fill up fast.
Here are a few things you’ll want to keep in mind as you’re meeting with your wedding cake bakery.
Guest count
I know this one seems like a no-brainer. Every wedding vendor you talk to will ask you about your guest count. This is one of the reasons we don’t recommend reserving your cake too early. The closer we get to the date, the better idea we’ll have of your guest count. This is important for the size of the cake and/or quantity of desserts for your dessert table. If you’re not sure if the guest count, that’s OK. You can still put a hold on the date so that it doesn’t get booked and we can talk size and quantity as it gets closer.
Cake Flowers
We talk all about Wedding Cake Flowers on our last blog, but we wanted to reiterate here the importance of talking to your florist first! Your wedding cake bakery will always ask about your florist. We’ll need to know if they’re providing the florals for your cake or if we are. Either one is fine. We just need to know. This minimizes follow-up and room for error. Most florists will charge extra for cake flowers and the last thing we want is for you to find out a week before the wedding that you submitted a cake design with a beautiful cascade of roses, but that it’s going to cost an extra $200 from your florist. Don’t worry – we’ve spent years building strong relationships with florists all over Phoenix. So, we’ll coordinate everything with them. We just need to know who they are.
Plans change
This one is the bullet point that no one who’s planning a wedding wants to read. Here’s the thing though, it’s not a huge deal. There are so many options that no matter what you end up with, your wedding will be amazing, I promise. When it comes to cake, we see a couple of things happen more often than you might think. First, couples just straight-up forget what they picked. Between selecting napkins and floral, deciding where your Uncle Ray is going to sit so that he doesn’t bug any of your friends from college, and making sure that you get your venue deposit in on time, thinking of the best wedding party gifts and meeting with five different photographers before settling on the perfect one, and, and, and…you get the point…you’re going to have a lot of things on your mind. We see it all the time. If you meet with your wedding cake bakery too early and don’t have a perfect filing system with the color-coded three-ring binder, you just may forget what the heck you ordered. You’ll want to know what the menu is in case you find out you have guests with dietary restrictions, or you want to create those cute signs or add the desserts and cake flavors to menu cards.
The second thing we see often as far as the best-laid plans go, you may just change your mind. If you leave too much time between when you meet with us and your wedding date, you may realize you want something different. The wedding industry doesn’t move slowly. Trends change. Your color palette could change. Wedding vibes change. We’ve even seen venues change! So, you’ll want as much as possible set in stone before you book your wedding cake bakery.
Your Bakery Menu
Speaking of change, this isn’t so much about your plans as it is about your bakery. We can’t speak for the whole industry, but at least for us, we love experimenting. We’re constantly trying new things and are always up for a challenge. So, it’s always possible that if you look at our menu in December, come June, it’ll look completely different. If you meet with us too early, you could miss out on our most current menu offerings.
When To Meet with Your Wedding Cake Bakery
There are a lot of suggestions out there. So, take every suggestion you see with a grain of salt (or sugar…we just can’t resist a little bakery humor haha). But we hope we’ve broken down the reasons that we recommend meeting with your wedding cake bakery 3-4 months before the wedding, and 5-6 months for bigger weddings including dessert tables.
If your nuptials are upcoming, we’re excited to bake for you and start planning your one-of-a-kind wedding cake. Give our new Wedding Cake Customizer a try.