I’m a gal that loves to plan. My childhood games could have put many of ‘The Apprentice’ challenges to shame.  One thing I’ve loved planning since I was a child is my wedding. And in all my years of planning, my wedding gained and lost a few thousand elements.  There was one point where I wanted to incorporate a pink bicycle I found at a boutique.  That was quickly discarded when I met a boyfriend that hated bicycles (I broke up with him – really, who hates bicycles?)

One element that has remained consistent is the lack of cake.
It’s not that I dislike cake.
It’s that I didn’t want to be the bride that had cake.
(Nothing against brides who have cake – you gals have got it going on! It just has never been my style.)

When my darling fiance proposed, we talked about the kind of wedding we both envisioned.  He knew about my obsession with planning and I knew about his obsession with keeping things laid back. Between the two of us, we knew that we wanted a party, rather than a ‘reception’. We also knew that we wanted to infuse that party with our personalities.

In this first post, I want to tell you about our first deviation from tradition: No cake.

I have found so many resources from Brides that chose gourmet cupcakes or pie or Petit Fours or, or, or…
And in all of them, I see the wonderful elements that make that particular choice unique and celebratory and all the things a tradition should be. The trick with any new tradition is to make it yours.

My fiance and I have chosen ours:

{Hotel St. Germain}

It starts out as something like this, but we’ll add pieces that are uniquely us. For example, I don’t cook very often, but once stumbled on a wonderful broiled banana sauce that goes divinely with dark chocolate. We’ll use these two flavors to create a unique (and optional) sauce for guests to drizzle over each creme puff.

We initially searched for something that was ancestral. His family is primarily from Germany and a side of my family is Scottish.  There were no foods among those choices that we both liked.  We asked about family traditions – what had our parents and grandparents served at their weddings? The response was ‘cake’, so we knew we would need to look elsewhere.  We looked amongst our favorite desserts – his, fruit pizza, mine, creme puffs.  He spoke in such a sweet tone when he said ‘Let’s do something with the creme puffs, I want you to have the things you love.’

Wow.

The Croquembouche in the picture above (turns out, it’s a French Tradition to have such a thing at a wedding – go France!) will always remind me of that tone in his voice. And for the rest of my life, the pictures of our event will be infused with that love.  I want the guests to participate in the celebration of that love, so I hope they will eat some of the Croquembouche and enjoy it.  I often need a reminder that the purpose behind design is to delight those I love best and to celebrate important events I hope to memorize.  The special and unique is already there. And when I put my sweet fiance or our love in the limelight, the elements are easy to find.

This is the funny part: all my years of planning are no match for the clarity that love brings.  Oh!  But, please don’t tell my fiance that, he might use it to aid his fight against my planning tendencies.