The Blog for Irish Brides (and Grooms!)

To top it all off….

Last night on RTE’s new show Higher Ground, you might have seen Jill FitzGerald and her Cake Topper Business.  Jill handmakes personalised cake toppers for wedding and occasion cakes.  They can be as quirky or traditional as you choose…the limit is your imagination!  Is your groom a big GAA-head or Rugby buff?  Maybe you play classical violin or are a doctor?  Jill can create characters that represent the happy couple and ad a fun element to the wedding cake.

“Using photographs of the happy couple, and including quirky details for that added touch of humour, these caricatures of the bride and groom can incorporate uniforms, hobbies, sports, county colours, or be more traditional in their wedding attire. Pets, children and other additions can of course be included too - the choice is yours!”

The pieces are modelled by hand using coloured polymer clays (Fimo), so your topper not only features on your wedding cake, but also acts as a permanent keepsake of your wedding day.  Beware though - you can’t eat them!

Jill also suggests giving the toppers as an unusual and personal wedding gift.  Just make sure to order in time (at least 6 weeks before the wedding date).  A handmade personalised cake topper from Jill will set you back about €120.00.  Get some inspirational ideas on the website: www.caketoppersireland.com

Be My Cupcake?!

As you all know I love cupcakes!  So much so, I had them at our own launch party.  So, when AnneMarie Kelleher contacted me about her new cupcake business, based in Cork and offered to bring me a box to trial…well, you can figure out the rest!  [I did it for ye guys, I swear!]

ANYWAY - AnnMarie handmakes the cupcakes herself and specialises in the decoration…no request is too much for this lady as she really makes a personal effort to get what you want.  She has some great ideas too as you’ll see from her sample gallery.

Very few places are specialised cupcake makers, so its great to talk to someone whose sole business is cupcakes and at a VERY reasonable price too!!  AnnMaries cupcakes start at €1.50 per cake which is about as cheap as you will find anywhere.  They come in boxes of 6 or 12, so why not contact her and order a box for the office as a trial?!  Your co-workers will love you forever!

Delivery is free with orders over €30 in Cork City.

The World’s Ugliest Wedding Cakes

Everyone loves a bit of cake, and at your own wedding you can go as extravagant as possible with it!  Think multiple tiers, lucious icing and intricate decorations.  While browsing cakes online the other day, I came across the website uglyweddingcake.com - where you can take a peek at some wedding cake disasters.  Oh lordy - The poor brides!

If you are feeling a little stressed with thoughts of your own wedding, check these out - they are bound to give you a giggle and make you feel better.  Take comfort in the fact that the chances of your own wedding cake turning out looking anything like this are pretty slim.  (we hope!)  You have been warned…..

Dodgy Wedding Cakes

Dodgy Wedding Cakes

Happy Wedding Day!

Yes, I realise that the below is a birthday cake and that most of us do not get married on our birthdays. (Although how much would that rock? It really would be all about you!) I just thought this was a really sweet looking cake and that the toppers were super-fun:

It would be adorable to spell out the bride and groom’s names instead of Happy Birthday, plus there’s a whole world of colour options you can go with for this idea:

This supplier does not ship abroad (boo!) but I’m thinking this would be a really fun DIY craft with loads of possibilities if you like paper arts and stamping. And if you do, what better excuse is there to buy yet more paper and more stamps than your wedding day?

Dreaming of Cake!

No wedding is complete without a wedding cake - whether they are eaten or not is another thing!  What many of you may not have heard of out there is - The Groom’s Cake.  This is a seperate cake to the main wedding cake and is usually decorated in a fun and quirky way, often in a theme that brings out the hobbies or personality of the groom.

You can be as creative as you want and some fun ideas include:

  • Favorite football team logo
  • Piece of sporting equipment (think football, surfboard)
  • Beer can for the beer-minded groom
  • Treasured guitar/musical instrument

Just make sure you have a good cake-icer!

The concept of the Grooms cakes started in Deep South in the States, all based around a superstition that applied to any single woman who attended a wedding.   According to the legend, if the woman took home a slice of the groom’s cake and slept with it under her pillow that night, she would dream of the man that she will marry while asleep and she’d know by morning who she would be spending the rest of her life with.


Regardless of whether or not the superstition holds any truth, the tradition is coming back into style…and I think it’s a nice way to honour the groom and have another fun and unique element to your wedding!

Let them eat cupcakes!

We had wedding cupcakes at the launch party and they were a complete hit with everyone there.  In the planning stages, when I was working out my numbers and planning the supplies needed for the party, my Mum smiled knowingly and tried to reassure me that while a ‘cute’ idea, not everyone would actually eat a “cupcake” and 80 would be MORE than enough.  For a party of 200.  My father confessed told me AFTER all of the cupcakes were done that he didn’t actually know what we had been on about for the past few days and simply went along with things to keep the peace.  “Sher, aren’t they just queen-cakes, whats all this fuss about cupcakes about?”

ANYWAY, contrary to the widely held belief by my family that I was gone cupcake-crazy (they were actually the part of the party that caused me the most stress and worry) they were one of the big hits of the night, with people commenting on them and even leaving messages in the guestbook about how much they had enjoyed them.

So I guess the moral of the story is: People like cake.  They like tiny bitesize sweet things and they like edible things to look pretty.  Our wedding cupcakes ticked all of those boxes.  We bought about 80 of them from O’Hara’s bakery for about €2.00 for a dozen and the rest were homemade.  About 50 by my Mum, and 100 more by one of her friends.  All of them were iced by hand the day before and the day of the party.  They turned out fantastic and were EXACTLY what I had in mind when I planned all of this in my head.  We displayed them on cute little 3 tiered cupcakes stands (homemade by the genius that is Sabrina Dent) and they were the perfect sweet treat for people on the night.

Homemade wedding cupcakes
Homemade wedding cupcakes with weddingdates.ie branding!

Wedding Cupcakes are a cute and different idea to replace the wedding cake.  Or indeed go WITH the wedding cake!  If, like me you are working on a budget you CAN DIY them.  Just make sure you (or whoever is making them for you) do a few trial runs.  Not only with the mixture itself, but with the icing.  We used butter icing dyed with food colouring, but I was reliably informed it took a good few trail batches to get the colour JUST RIGHT.  ;) You can buy piping bags and nozzles from any good bakery supplies shop but again, do a test run.  My Mum and her pal had never even picked up a piping bag in their lives before attempting mine on the morning of the launch, but they learned fast and the end results were perfect.

If however you aren’t willing to hand over that level of responsibility to someone or would rather NOT to have to worry about the colour of the frosting on your cake days or even hours before your big day, then I can heartily recommend both of these suppliers of delicious cupcakes.

Dublin Cupcakes supplied delicious  dainty cakes for the Irish Web Awards held in Dublin last year and they were a big hit on the night with all in attendance.  The almost luminous icing which coloured peoples faces, and fingers and tongues on the night is testament to that!

This weekend, for the Irish Blog Awards held down in my fair county of Cork the lovely Jo from PíosaCake supplied the ladies of the pre-awards Tea Party with the lightest and fluffiest carrotcake cupcakes I have ever tasted.  They were devine and the men bloggers were howling at the door of the apartment to get a taste of them!

Spooktacular Wedding Cakes

I’ve always been a fan of Halloween weddings around this time of year because let’s face it: autumnal themes are hard to work with. But Halloween weddings give you a really fun, ready-made theme and when you decide to really go for it, you can end up with a cake nobody will ever forget, like this one from Let Them Eat Cake:

If you don’t want to go down the whole Halloween colour way route, there are still spooktacular cakes to be had, like this really beautiful blue and silver toned cake from Wild Cakes:

And of course, you can always serve these absolutely adorable ghost cupcakes instead of traditional wedding cake, or send one home with each guest as a wedding favour:

I’m an absolute sucker for wedding cupcakes, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one cuter.

All of these Halloween finds were shamelessly borrowed from Cake Wrecks, a must-read website if only because it will frequently show you what the absolute worst case, everything-gone-wrong, nightmare wedding cake scenario can look like.

Hopefully at someone else’s wedding.