Food on a Budget: Dessert Edition

This is the first in a series concerning wedding food and our journey to our wedding, via our stomachs. I hope you enjoy it as much as we have. You might need a napkin to wipe the drool from the corner of your mouth though. Uncensored food images ahead. Please eat before you read this! :)

When we decided on our wedding, there wasn't any question that we would be having a meal. We like food. All sorts of food. From my travels, I have been exposed to Korean, Indian and British cuisine and I have come to love all of them. Jeff? Well, he just loves food. There's not one meal that I make that he doesn't love. Favorites are probably roast meat of any kind along with mash. I have introduced him to a wider range of food and he has loved it all. And I love cooking. It is a passion I get from both of my parents. I love baking, trying new recipes, inventing meals and trying to recreate meals I love and miss from back home and Korea. Let's be honest, I love food almost as much as I love my fiance.

Now, where was I?

Ah, yes. Our wedding day food.

Right now I want to talk about the part of the day that we have the most control over and that which is perfectly planned out.

Dessert.

When I first started dreaming of my wedding day (way before I met Jeff), I thought it would be cool and different to have this for my wedding cake:

Croquembouche image via: Alons

I think I wanted this because I really like cream puffs. I fondly recall my mom making them occasionally and I'm pretty sure I would eat them until I made myself sick. I'm not French, I don't pretend to be French, but I really wanted this for my untraditional wedding cake. Fortunately, I don't still want this.

When planning our wedding, we talked about our options for cake. To be honest, Jeff doesn't visually care about this too much. It's all about the taste for him. So for me, the more I thought about a wedding cake and did research, the more problems I found with what was traditional and common.

Image: Martha Stewart via: Bridal Buds

We contemplated cupcakes, but decided that I would go nuts trying to bake enough (plus my cupcake pan only cooks 6 at a time, so not that ideal.) Specialty cupcakes are not common around here like they are in the USA.

Image via: Smitten Kitchen

 A traditional cake was too expensive for us to afford. And to be honest, that's a lot of cake.

Image via: Culinary Creations

Traditional tiered cakes give me a natural fear of it collapsing before we can eat it (thanks for that America's Funniest Home Videos).

Image via: Culinary Creations

I also don't understand the point of putting lots of flowers on a cake. I think that it often looks pretty, but I'm not going to eat the flowers, I want to eat cake.

So clearly a traditional wedding cake, or cupcake tower, is out of the question for the various reasons stated above. Financially we really can't afford to get a baker to make a cake for us and I don't want fondant or marzipan icing on my cake. Period.

My FMIL has offered to make our wedding cake for us and we have found the perfect cake (with complete recipes) for her to make. Introducing our Grasshopper Cake:

Image via: The Patriotic Baker from Baked New Frontiers in Baking

Image via: Marzipan Mom

Our favorite combination is chocolate and mint, so why not have our cake be the same? We're just having this single cake for cutting and eating and it will be awesome. There will be NO cake smashing because we both feel it is a waste of food. The recipe that The Patriotic Baker posted from the cookbook covers all aspects of the cake and the best part is that the frosting is supposed to withstand room temp or warmer temps so it won't be runny! I've printed out the recipe and FMIL will make a practice cake so we can try it before the wedding.

The second part of our dessert I will be taking care of in the weeks before our wedding: pies!

Image via: Joonbug

Since I first made my own pie while living in South Korea, I have taken it upon myself to master pie making. Sort of. Let's just face it, I like pies and Jeff likes pies too. We contemplated only having pies at our wedding, but then we found the grasshopper cake recipe and that was that. Since we're only having a single cake, we thought more dessert was needed. So I will make 8 or 9 pies to serve alongside our cake. Best thing is that I can make most of them in advance and freeze them until the day of.

Image via: Laura on Facebook

Look at me with my first made-from-scratch apple pie way back in 2007. Man, I was proud of that pie and enjoyed every bite!

I was given a pie cookbook for Christmas back in 2009 that has 500 recipes in it. I reckon I can get our 8 or 9 pie recipes out of that and we'll be sorted for our wedding desserts!

Did anyone else freak out over the cost of wedding cake? Any other alternative dessert people out there? Even though we're still being semi-traditional, I like that we aren't limiting ourselves to a basic cake!