Maples Cakes and specifically Jay, the owner, did a marvelous job on my sister’s cake last year, so it really wasn’t too surprising that that’s where we ended up when it was time to start work on our cake.  We went to a tasting just to make sure (no, really, it was to make sure- not just ’cause it was free cake… I swear!)  There we sampled 18 different cakes flavors (lemon, pumpkin, melon (surprisingly awesome), strawberry, orange, vanilla, chocolate, chocolate mocha and banana to name a few!  Lots of  butter creams, and several scrumptious fillings in various combination such as their ever popular sour cream almond pound cake with vanilla butter cream and raspberry filling with white chocolate fondant (wow, what a tasty mouthful!).  They even have a Barbecue cake with honey glaze icing (it seriously tastes like barbecue…I’m sure it’ll come in handy!  )

Alexis & Abdul's Wedding Cake - By Maples

We decided that day what flavors we were interested in:  Banana and Chocolate Mocha (we love banana chocolate-chip pancakes so it was kind of inevitable).  That did not, however, stop us from scheduling a private tasting so that we could share all of the flavors with The Committee (Mother, Sister and Coordinator- never say we don’t take care of our people!) and have Jay’s undivided attention to figure out what it was going to look like!  Here are some of the pictures we found to show him as a starting point (Very important to give your cake designer an idea of what you like so you can get to the finer details that much faster):

Black & White Classic

Good colors, clean lines- Jay actually knows the designer of this cake, so that was neat.

Art Deco Box Cake

How fun is this cake?!  Great shape and interest!  Very difficult to make though.

White Chocolate Spiral

Elegant and lovely (impossible to cut neatly!)

So- there are a variety of styles, colors and shapes (may not have been as helpful as we’d hoped!) and then we were able to identify traits that we liked about cakes in the Maples show room.  We wanted some spiraling, some shape contrast and simple texture (not a lot of fussy flowers or decorations).  In the end, I drew a picture (I’m like that).

Cake Design

This cake will be four square layers (alternating chocolate mocha and banana- both with chocolate butter cream- oh so tasty!) of graduated sizes with round spacers in between (I know, it’s huge, but the guest list keeps growing!  What’s a girl to do?!).  Each square layer will be rotated to create an overall spiraling effect.  The bottom of each square layer will be wrapped with a red and black ribbon to keep the edges sharp.  The feather shapes (recognize that from the bouquet?!) will be impressed into the white chocolate fondant, so it will be tone on tone with just a bit of feather texture scattered across the surface of the cake.  Neat, ehh?  I cut the feather out of plastic so that Jay can roll the shape into the fondant without getting feather pieces stuck in the fondant (eating feathers-not so tasty).  It should be spectacular!

Wish me luck!