How I Planned My Wedding: Dessert

A Wedding Planner's Personal Journey

I dreamed up and threw out many ideas for dessert before I finally settled on a choice I really loved. My original plan was to have ice cream catered from Smitten Ice Cream (a specialty liquid-nitrogen ice cream shop based in San Francisco), since my husband and I ended many of our dates with a scoop of their seasonal ice cream. That idea went out the door when I contacted them, and they quoted me an amount that was three times the budget I had allotted for dessert. Uhhh $12 a person for one scoop of ice cream? No thank you. After contacting other ice cream shops in the Bay Area and met with similarly high pricing, un-cute ice cream carts, and Sebastopol being outside their area of service, I finally gave up on my ice cream idea and started the search for alternative dessert that would be just as wow-worthy.

Luckily I did, because my search led me to Amanda of Just Bakecause, who not only is the only dessert caterer I know who makes pavlovas (my favorite dessert of all time), but has also become one of my dearest and sweetest (haHA - pun intended) friends. We clicked the instant we met at my cake tasting, and she even ended up hosting a cake workshop for me and my bridesmaids! (You can check out the gallery here and the blog post here). What started as a simple dessert order of one small cake for cutting and mini pavlovas for our dessert bar turned into three cakes when I couldn't choose just one cake flavor, and macarons were added when I tasted them at a styled shoot and decided that my guests needed them in their lives too.

Our dessert bar was a hit with our guests, even though most had never tried pavlovas before. For those who don't know, a pavlova is a meringue base with a crunchy exterior and marshmallow-y interior, topped with whipped cream and fresh berries. If you haven't tried one before, you really need to! Hit up Just Bakecause if you're in the Bay Area, or if you're not, this recipe is a pretty good one. I loved that our guests had a bit of variety, and that there was something for everyone, whether they were cake or macaron lovers. In the end, we couldn't keep our guests away from the dessert table!