Come and check out the 2011 Brides Give Back event!

Here's an amazing event we will be part of in February. We were fortunate enough to participate in the first Brides Give Back event in 2009 and this one looks to be even more fun and there are some amazing products and services from some of the best vendors in the wedding biz. This year we have donated... Free Anniversary Cakes for Life! That's a 6" anniversary cake every single year, forever and ever!

Here are all of the details. We hope to see you there!

PHOENIX – January 3, 2011 – Engaged couples have yet another reason to celebrate. Tickets are now on sale for the February 23rd, 2011 Brides Give Back event. Brides and grooms are invited to save big on their wedding day expenses by bidding on services donated by the Valley’s top wedding professionals. The big day soiree will take place at the Historic Icehouse in downtown Phoenix and will benefit Save the Family Foundation of Arizona, a local charity helping homeless families get back on their feet.

The cocktail party auction will offer brides and grooms the opportunity to sip champagne, mingle with Phoenix’s luxury wedding professionals, and bid on everything from photography to florals. Couples who attended the last Brides Give Back event secured wedding day essentials at as little as 30 percent of retail value, with all proceeds directly benefiting families in need. The event will feature musical entertainment, silent and live auctions, and cake samples galore.

For more details or to purchase tickets, visit www.bridesgiveback.com. Following the social entrepreneurship trend, all ticket sales and 100% of net proceeds benefit Save the Family.

Brides Give Back began in 2009. In it’s first year, the auction of more than $30,000 worth of donated goods and services helped to provide a night of shelter for 77 victims of domestic abuse.

About Save the Family

Save the Family has been serving homeless families with children for more than 20 years. Founded in 1988, Save the Family was created to help homeless families become self-sufficient. On the net: http://www.savethefamily.org/

www.bridesgiveback.com - 480.219.8067 - info@bridesgiveback.com

There are some things in this world that never get old...

Chocolate & peanut butter, a great steak (or an eggplant steak for our vegetarian friends), people telling you how thin you look, and hearing how much people love the work that you do.

Speaking of the latter, we have recently been notified that Piece of Cake has won a 2011 The Knot Best Of Weddings award!

We get amazing reviews online from brides every month, we get awards for being awesome every year, and we get thank you cards from couples every week and I can honestly say, it never gets old. In fact, we love, LOVE it.

What we do at Piece of Cake is a kind of a big deal, no, seriously. Hopefully, if you are about to buy a wedding cake, it will be the only one you ever buy. You'll have lots of cars, and likely homes in your life, but probably just the one wedding cake. When you celebrate your 30th wedding anniversary, you will remember little details of that cake. You won't remember how charming I was (and I was charming, believe that), and you may not even remember our company name, but you will remember some of the details of your wedding cake and you will absolutely remember if it was awesome or if it was a janky pile of suck. You may not remember the flavors, but you'll remember if you loved it or if you couldn't spit it out fast enough.

This is why we take what we do so seriously. The couples that choose Piece of Cake aren't just trusting us to make cake for them, they are trusting us to make a lifelong memory, and not just any lifelong memory, they are trusting us to make a great one.

Winning awards like this that are based on brides providing feedback about us, doesn't just mean that we make great cakes (we do though, ask my mom) it means that we created something that our couples loved and something they will remember fondly, forever. I've gotta tell you, from where I sit, that seems like a pretty great thing to do with our lives.

So, thank you so much to all of the couples that we have been lucky enough to work with in the past few years, we are proud to have created a great cake, and more importantly, a great memory for you.

I hate to see this happen to a couple on their wedding day.

We see this way too much. :( We get monthly calls for emergency wedding cakes because someone suddenly realized they couldn't handle the pressure of doing wedding cakes or delivered a bad product. Aside from a loophole in Tempe, Maricopa county doesn't allow home bakeries, yet 40+ new ones pop up every year... most are usually gone by the next year often leaving a bunch of upset brides in their wake. With the popularity of cake shows on TV, more and more people are deciding to take a stab at doing cakes professionally and more and more brides are having their big day ruined by a mess sitting on the cake table.

Note: The video is a bit slow to load


There are plenty of great cake companies in AZ, make sure you do your research on sites like Weddingwire.com and talk to your facility and other vendors about their recommendations before making such an important decision.

Best of luck!

How to avoid a cake topper tragedy

Anyone that has been to enough weddings has seen a cake topper decide that it wants to be anywhere but on top of the cake. It usually goes like this: The cake sits for an hour or so and begins to get softer, the ceramic topper with the poor center of gravity and improper weight distribution starts to lean. Unfortunately the tiny base of the topper is no match for the forces at work and the topper falls. It would be nice if it jumped clear of the cake when falling, but no such luck; it hits the top tier, then the middle; and finally crashes into the corner of the bottom tier and just like that your very beautiful cake becomes very ugly.

Nearly all cake gets softer the longer it is out of refrigeration and what used to be a flat firm cake top starts to give with the weight of the topper. As long as the topper has an appropriately sized base, it’s usually not a problem, but many of the toppers being sold today have a tiny base and incredibly poor weight distribution (like the one with the groom holding the bride).Here is an easy test to see if your topper could cause you problems on your wedding day:

Put a clean pillowcase on your pillow and sit your topper right in the middle of the pillow. If it doesn’t wobble and fall off… it should be safe on your cake, assuming it isn’t really heavy.

Even if it is heavy, your cake baker can probably account for the weight by adding support underneath it. It’s easy to support a heavy topper with a big base, but supporting a top heavy topper with a small base can still often lead to disaster.

If you already have a topper that doesn’t pass the pillow test, you can always use flowers or something else as the cake topper and place the ceramic topper on the table. It looks great and it will eliminate a potential wedding day problem.

Happy Planning!

(reposted from my blog entry on weddingaces.com)

Cake smashing and the rule of tenfold

If you are married, getting married, or have ever attended a wedding you are probably familiar with this practice. For the uninitiated, it goes like this; bride and groom cut the first piece of cake and instead of simply feeding it to each other, they smash it in each other's faces. Often this practice is discussed ahead of time and the bride and groom decide if they will be gingerly feeding each other or introducing their new spouse to the business end of a handful of buttercream.

As long as they both know what to expect, it's all good. Plenty of people look forward to smashing cake in the grill of their new spouse as much as anything else on their wedding day. However, a complication can occur if it has been predetermined that no smashing will take place and then, in the heat of the moment one of them breaks the vow and smashes anyway. Most grooms don't want any part of the surprise smashing because they know if they get cake on that dress, things could go pear shaped pretty quickly for them. But when the bride is the one that stages the ambush, a little known genetic defect in every man could rear it's ugly head. Guys, you know what I'm talking about... The rule of tenfold!

Not familiar with the rule of tenfold ladies? You may not know it by name, but surely you have seen it in action at least once. Ever been hanging out by the pool when Dude A splashes a little water on Dude B and almost instantly Dude A finds himself in the pool with all of his clothes on, iPhone in pocket? Classic rule of tenfold example. The guys rule of tenfold simply states that anything someone does to you, you must immediately do back to them with 10x the intensity. The rule is like Fight Club in the sense that we don't talk about it, but I assure you it exists and it generally comes forward like a reflex, with no thought at all.

As you might expect, when an unsuspecting guy gets a face full of cake, he may involuntarily head down an ugly road, one that is gong to leave your dress covered in red velvet cake and his buddies cheering him on like he's playing in the Super Bowl.

So ladies... but be careful out there. It's OK to smash but I suggest you provide as much warning as possible to minimize any potential dress damage.

A word to the fellas:

If you have an agreement in place to refrain from smashing, prepare yourself for the possibility that your new bride could break the treaty...and if she does, let it slide brother, let it slide. Dab a little frosting on her nose with a smile and let it go man. I promise you will be glad you did!

Glee cake

When the cast of the hit TV show Glee was in town last week performing Glee Live, we were scheduled to head over to the KISSFM 104.7 studio with our friends at A Savory Affair (amazing caterers) to deliver a cake we would be creating for the cast. We had planned and prepped for it, baked cakes, and were ready to dive into the heavy decorating when a schedule change nixed their in studio radio interview. No big deal, stuff happens and celebrity schedules change, but there was a problem... we REALLY wanted to make this cake. So what does a mildly unstable cake shop staff do when an order falls though for a cake we really want to make? We return to work Saturday afternoon after our deliveries and make it anyway!!! (You know you love what you do when you do it... just to do it!) We changed up the design a bit, but we love the way it came out!

What do we do with a 100 serving Glee themed cake that took hours to make that no longer has an intended recipient? That part was easy.. I called up the wonderful people over at Sunshine Acres Children's Home and as luck would have it they have 60+ great kids and 30 staff members who just so happen to love free cake! We delivered it Monday afternoon and by the reception we got you would think we had just delivered new cars, it not only made their week but it made ours too.

In the end I couldn't be happier with how it worked out, we got to have fun creating it, Gleeks everywhere get some new cake eye candy, and the kids of Sunshine Acres got one heck of a dessert.

And that, my friends, is one of the many reasons I love what I do!

Piece of Cake wins a 2010 Bride's Choice Award and 2010 The Knot Best Of Weddings!!

We recently found out that we were voted as one of the The Knot’s top 10 wedding cake companies in the entire state Arizona in their 2010 Best of Weddings survey! Thank you to everyone who voted for us! We’re listed in the Spring/Summer 2010 issue of The Knot: Arizona, which is in stores now. It’s such an honor because it’s based on surveys where brides & grooms vote on their favorite local wedding professionals, and we’re so excited to have been chosen. Thank you!!!

Also thanks so much to the brides that have reviewed our services over at WeddingWire.com, thanks to all of your wonderful reviews we were named as a winner of the 2010 Bride's Choice Awards!

While I am tooting our horn, ;) I just remembered that I never posted that we were voted Best Tasting Cake 2009 by the readers of Arizona's Finest Wedding Sites and Services.

Thanks so much to all of you that voted for us for any of the awards we received, we are a very small company that works extremely hard to make certain that our part of your big day is amazing and it's always great to hear that we succeeded.