by Susan Wiggs
A good rule of thumb is to give each set of parents at least 10 percent of the head count. And no, this percentage does not include relatives you would invite anyway. Let your parents choose their people after you and your fiancé have formed your own guest list—that way you can’t screw them over by claiming that your sister counts as one of your mom’s guests. Think about it: for a 150-person wedding, your mom and dad get fifteen people they don’t have to clear with you. Fifteen people who will make your folks feel more at ease and special on their baby’s wedding day. Same goes for your in-laws. You and your fiancé, on the other hand, will still have a full 120 spots, and that’s not so shabby. Particularly if you’re not footing your own bill.
Another note: never invite someone thinking, “They’ll never come.” Those are always the people who show up with their unmedicated kids, a Jack Russell terrier with abandonment issues and your ex-boyfriend, whom they happen to know through their halitosis specialist. My mom convinced me to invite a ton of people this way. When I protested that we were already at capacity, and that additional guests would suck up the pennies left in our budget, she would say, “Just invite them—people hate coming to weddings. They’ll send you a gift and never actually show up.”
As you probably figured, many of these assumed no-shows not only ended up coming to the wedding but also were among the most demanding guests. Then again, I can say with absolute confidence that my wedding day was the happiest day of my life, and I wouldn’t want to toy with myself by wishing things could have been different. Maybe I would have had a worse time if my mom’s half-insane motivational speaker friend hadn’t shown up, gotten way too drunk and passed out in a chair next to the crepe station.
So if and when your mom’s zany acquaintance descends upon your wedding—when she brings your ex-boyfriend as her “plus one,” despite being thirty years his senior…and when your fortieth cousin thrice removed comes and brings all four of his teenaged daughters and their greasy, emo boyfriends…and when a crowd of your nemeses from high school hears about your wedding from guests on the ferry on the way over and pretends that stopping by the reception to “say hi” and steal some cupcakes isn’t the same as crashing your wedding…you’ll just have to smile. Because, yes, this is the happiest day of your life, even when things go wrong. And all the people who show up—even the ex-boyfriend who’s glowering at your new husband from the corner of the room—are supporting your union just by being there. You’re celebrating the start of your married life, and everyone present will bear witness to that, adding their energy and spirit to fuel the joy you’re experiencing.
And bonus—you now have a spouse who will happily join you in talking major trash about the schmoes who executed epic wedding faux pas. Faux pases? Whatever.
FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD: DEVELOPING
YOUR MENU AND CHOOSING YOUR DESSERT
Remember, back in the chapter on budget, when I talked about making a list of wedding priorities? Dave and I made a list of all the elements we wanted in our celebration and then listed our priorities from most to least important. Stuff at the top of the list got lots of money; stuff at the bottom, if it ended up in the wedding at all, was as cheap as we could make it.
For us, menu was near the bottom. At one point, I considered putting boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios and pitchers of milk on the tables and calling it a day. Considering all the weddings I’ve ever attended, the only food I can remember is the clam linguini that gave me food poisoning.
I feel bad saying so, because I have vivid memories of my girlfriends agonizing over whether they should serve filet mignon with the lemon beurre blanc sauce or the red wine peppercorn reduction. I had a friend who nearly canceled her wedding over sourdough rolls.
And don’t even get me started on the cake dramas.
So when I sat down over brunch with my mom to talk about the menu for our wedding, I really couldn’t have cared less what we ended up serving. If my guests were anything like me (a decent possibility since most of them were either friends or relatives), they would only remember the food if they ended up seeing it a second time as it arced from their mouths to the porcelain god in the bathroom. Seriously—think back to the weddings you’ve been to: do you remember what you ate? Can you get any more specific than what type of animal was on your plate?
I’d done enough research to know that catering could cost me the equivalent of a one-bedroom condo with a balcony and stainless steel appliances in New York City. No T-bone steak and lobster tail for me. Still, I wanted to make sure that I didn’t serve anything so lame (Spam and Miracle Whip sand wiches?) that my guests would walk out.
My mom and I were seated in one of Seattle’s most famous brunch spots as we started tossing out ideas for the menu. I wasn’t exactly inspired by anything we came up with, though. Chicken breast? Too dry and boring. Salmon? The taste makes me gag, so, uh, no. Halibut? Too expensive. Duck? Ever read Make Way for Ducklings? No way was I gonna eat something that had once been a fuzzy yellow ball of adorable.
I looked down at the giant brunch menu our waiter had just plopped on the table and, as usual, couldn’t make a decision about what to order because it all just seemed so yummy. God, breakfast food is good.
“I wish I could just have this be the menu for our wedding,” I muttered.
And then sucked in my breath.
“What’s wrong?” my mom asked, looking at me cross-eyed from behind her 85 times magnification menu-reading glasses. She leaned in conspiratorially. “DO YOU NEED A TAMPON?” she whispered loudly, “BECAUSE I DON’T HAVE ONE ON ME.”
“Ugh, Mom! No!” I said, swiveling my head to see if any of our fellow brunchgoers had heard. “But I just realized…everybody loves brunch. Why don’t we just forget about fancy food and serve breakfast for dinner?”
I looked at her expectantly, waiting for the “Ah-ha! My daughter is a genius!” moment.
She took off her glasses and blinked owlishly at me.
“Breakfast…for dinner?” she said slowly. “But…that’s so weird.”
“No, it’s not!” I insisted. “Think about it—we can have an omelet bar, and serve crepes, and fruit, and bacon—I mean, who doesn’t love bacon?—and…and…we can have a French toast mountain instead of a cake!!!”
I looked down at the menu in my hands and another thought hit me, one that I was sure would send my mother into paroxysms of gratitude and happiness.
“AND—breakfast food is cheap! We won’t be serving meat for the main course, so just think—it can’t cost more than fifteen or twenty bucks a head!”
My mother looked at me blankly.
I didn’t care. In my mind, the matter was settled. I knew Dave, the box-and-a-half-a-day cereal eater, would love the idea. That afternoon, when I told him about my stroke of brilliance, the look of adoration he gave me let me know I was right. We would serve breakfast for dinner, have French toast instead of cake, and my mom would have to deal.
OH. CUPCAKES.
Yeah, we were planning to have a pile o’ French toast for dessert, but as soon as my mother realized that this crazy idea was actually going to happen, she called me up and told me that cake was “required.” Apparently, one of her friends had thrown a hissy fit about it and she bowed to peer pressure. Then, HORROR, she decided that not only was cake required, but we had to serve cupcakes—the one wedding dessert that made my stomach turn in disgust.
Cupcake towers just don’t do it for me. They’re inelegant, busy and generally childish. But up till that point, my mom’s input for the wedding had been largely restrictive: you can’t have that many guests, you can’t have nice invitations, you can’t have six bridesmaids. I was determined to say yes to the one positive command my mother had issued.
So I started researching. And I realized that cupcakes don’t have to be tacky. I could serve cupcakes, keep my mom happy and stay true to my modern vintage style. Forget cartoony cupcake towers splashed with all the colors in the Crayola box; there were cupcake bakers who co
uld create elegant, subtle arrangements in an array of mouthwatering flavors that would have guests begging for more.
My wedding planners caught wind of the idea and sent me a flurry of photographs from past weddings featuring—even better—mini cupcakes! Each little cake was two bites of moist, flavorful goodness and the caterers didn’t go around the dining room afterward throwing away the dry bottoms of large cupcakes that guests discarded after making themselves queasy from eating the icing first.
And lucky me—Seattle was quickly becoming a cupcake capital. People in the Emerald City had taken notice of the powers of the cupcake, and sweet little independent shops were popping up all over the place with vintage signs and inspiring names like Cupcake Royale, Trophy Cupcakes, the Yellow Leaf Cupcake Company and—with an evil cupcake as their logo—Look Cupcake. Being an evil cupcake myself, I was instantly sold on Look. But their logo was only the beginning of the awesomeness. Look Cupcake was the only cupcake company in Seattle to offer “filled” cupcakes—in other words, not only was there delicious buttercream icing adorning the dome of the cakes, but the bakers had piped filling into the center of each in flavors like mojito cheesecake, salted caramel and chocolate ganache.
I sat down with the owner of Look Cupcake, Rhienn Davis, and immediately knew I had met my cakey match. She plopped her laptop on the table in front of me, apologizing for the missing “L” key that her two-year-old had pulled off and the sticky, sweet-smelling mousepad. Unlike so many other people in the wedding industry, Rhienn was real. She wasn’t a manicured robot, ready to hit the “Play” button on her sales pitch and convince me to spend four times my budget on her product. She had darling children, a husband and a young business of her own, and she knew that what I wanted was an easy, delicious dessert that didn’t put me in the poorhouse.
We decided on four cupcake flavors, and there was no way I was going to pass up on her incredible taste options. My mom’s bland suggestions of chocolate and vanilla cupcakes flew out the window as I made my selections: The Feather Boa (coconut cream cake, mojito cheesecake filling, vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream), Summer in Your Hand (lemon cake with raspberry cheesecake filling and raspberry meringue buttercream), a vegan Emperor’s New Grove (vegan chocolate cake, Valencia orange vegan ganache and Valencia orange vegan buttercream) and, the pièce de résistance, a combo that I came up with myself, a custom chai cake with salted caramel filling and hazelnut meringue buttercream. It’s now called The Wiggs. Sometimes my own awesomeness frightens me.
Everything was going swimmingly, until I called my mom two months before the wedding to share the good news that her cupcake dream would come true. See, she thought that not only would cupcakes be the perfect alternative to cake, they would be less expensive than a four-foot, tiered monstrosity. But since we were getting minis and had an array of flavors for our guests to sample, we were going to need three cupcakes per guest, or, with our ballpark two-hundred-person wedding, six hundred cupcakes.
When my mom heard that, a blood vessel burst in her eyeball.
“Six…hundred cupcakes?” she gasped. “No. No no no nononononono. Forget it! Look, just go to a cupcake store the morning of your wedding, get three dozen cupcakes, and call it a day. You don’t need six hundred cupcakes. Most people won’t even touch your dessert!”
Funny, wasn’t that the exact opposite of her argument in which she informed me that I was “required” to serve cake, since cake was the “one thing that wedding guests want”?
And she forgot the fact that this close to the wedding, I was a veritable expert on serving sizes and the eating habits of wedding guests, and I knew that if we were going to serve cupcakes, we were going to need a lot of them. As my mom’s voice grew louder and more panicked on the other end of the phone, I interrupted her. “Mommy, I’m sorry, but you wanted cupcakes, and we’re going to have them. And we’re going to do it right.” I slowly lowered the receiver and hit the “End” button. This time, I knew, I was correct and I would simply have to do it without my mother’s go-ahead.
On the day of the wedding, we ended up having a snafu with the hors d’oeuvres and they didn’t get served during the cocktail hour while Dave and I were getting our portraits taken. So, like starving wildebeests, my guests stormed the cupcake display, which was tucked away for later, and devoured the entire thing. A plate of only eight cupcakes survived unscathed, and our apologetic wedding planners whisked them away to the bridal suite so Dave and I could enjoy our own dessert. I never did end up finding out who ate the first cupcake and tipped off the rest of the guests that it was okay to plunge into my carefully arranged dessert table. And if I do…well…let’s just say that he or she owes me a blood debt.
In the end, six hundred cupcakes was the right number. I think my mom ended up realizing that her objections to the cupcake volume had more to do with nerves over the impending event than some deep-seated psychological paranoia related to confectionary treats. And I definitely caught her shoveling a whole mini cupcake into each cheek when she thought no one was looking. I may have been caught up in my wedding day, but don’t think I wasn’t watching my mommy to make sure she was enjoying it every bit as much as I was.
SUSAN
Okay, so I kept it zipped all through the bacon-and-eggs menu, the save-the-planet no-flower rule, the cross-town commute between venues…but…no cake? C’mon. No cake? What? How can it be a wedding with no cake?
Sigh. In my almost-not-a-wedding a hundred years ago, the cake was just about the only traditional element we had. Maybe that’s why it just felt wrong to flop a pile of French toast in a chafing dish and call it dessert.
Deep, cleansing breath. And then clarity: there will be cake. There must be cake. How hard can it be? You don’t need a Taj Mahal made of sugar dough, just a sweet, unassuming little dessert so the guests will all know beyond doubt that they’ve been to a wedding.
Simple, right?
Something had to be done.
I came up with a compromise—cupcakes! They’re adorable. Everybody loves them. They cost about $20 per dozen. Now, that seemed a little pricey to me, but figuring one cupcake per guest, it works out to a couple hundred bucks, right?
Right?
And they’re easy. A no-brainer. What’s simpler than platters of cupcakes, artfully arranged on a table? And they won’t add to anyone’s work load either, because how hard can it be? You tell the cupcake-maker you want a few dozen in chocolate, vanilla and strawberry. No nuts; people get sued over nuts these days. Just three flavors with that nice little swirl of icing on top. Maybe some sprinkles, and we’re good to go.
Right?
Ohferpetesake. You’re way ahead of me, aren’t you?
She spent hours researching cupcakes.
Who could have imagined that she—your erstwhile sane, practical daughter—would be persuaded to order three cupcakes per guest? Despite the smartest of calculations, who could have anticipated that these tiny colorful bites would cost the moon?
And easy? Convenient? Hah. Cupcake people spit on easy and convenient. They exist to bedevil you. Did you know you’re supposed to have not one but at least two tasting appointments to pick fillings, frostings, flavors and flower garnishes? And that display options will rob you of sleep and haunt your dreams? What I discovered in the teeth of the Epic Battle of the Cupcakes was that there are as many flavors of cupcakes as there are ways to fight with your daughter—lavender infused, poppyseed vegan. Star anise meringue with goat cheese ganache. Twice-baked, half-baked, sushi cupcakes, you name it. They’ll even want to create a “signature cupcake” for you. C’mon, signature cupcake? And even worse—you’re supposed to taste them all.
I don’ t know about you, but I never met a cupcake I didn’t like. I don’t need to schedule a damn meeting to determine that.
However.
What doesn’t defeat you makes you stronger. I like to think I contributed to Elizabeth and Dave’s strength as a couple by testing their will. If they can survive me in cu
pcake-hating-Momzilla mode, they can conquer the world.
Of all the things to get in a catfight about, the least likely will be the one that sneaks up on you and incites a flurry of fury. Honestly, cupcakes?
Never underestimate the power of a bride to overcomplicate things. After an epic yelling match a calm, reasoned discussion, it was agreed that there would be cake. Specifically, cupcakes. The perfect solution. They’re cute, they’re delicious, they’re economical. They won’t give the hotel staff a reason to charge some crazy catering fee. Guests will just pop them in their mouths and walk away with a smile.
Who knew a simple cupcake could turn into hours of debate?
Fortunately, the solution is simple. Trust your well-raised daughter to do the right thing. She will find the ideal purveyor of cupcakes. She will spend many long, obsessive hours deciding on which flavors to purvey. And on the wedding day, the little cakes will magically appear…and lo. They will be delicious.
* * *
CHEAT SHEET
DYING TO STUFF YOUR FACE WITH CAKE INSTEAD OF
FINISHING THIS CHAPTER? HERE’S YOUR CHEAT SHEET:
While you still have the energy of a bride-to-be who hasn’t reached her wedding saturation point, truck through some of the tedium (such as starting your guest list and compiling addresses).
Let’s be honest: people probably won’t remember what they ate at your wedding. I don’t know about you, but I have trouble remembering what I ate for breakfast today. So choose food that speaks to you, and don’t worry too much about what everyone else will think.
Keeping Rule #2 in mind, though, if your mother or some other VIP draws a line in the sand over a particular food selection, you might just wanna give in. Hell hath no fury like a mother starved.
* * *
11
MY YEAR OF