Because We Love You

Today we took a bullet for you. We scoured the Seattle Area eating more cake than either of us has probably had in the past 12 months. That's right, we did it all for you. We sampled close to 15 different flavors and filling from 4 different bakeries. Never mind the sugar crash I'm experiencing and that Brianna's hands are a wee bit shaky from all that sugar, we did it purely out of care for our friends and family. Undoubtedly, those of you who are checking on our planning progress will want a bit of a report on the bakeries we've visited. Without further ado...

We started our morning at Mike's Amazing Cakes. If you tune into the Food Network occasionally, you may have seen some of Mike's impressive work. The bakery specializes in cakes that that look unlike any other cake you've ever seen. Truly spectacular artwork. Follow the link I embedded in the name for a more spectacular viewing experience. Here are the samples we tried. To the right you'll see spice cake with cream cheese filling and white cake with chocolate filling. The spice cake was incredible, and the cream cheese frosting was perfection.

After looking hard for the wrong 110 Denny Way Seattle- in fact, there are two 110 Denny Ways in Seattle- we ventured into Morfy's. Brianna has classified them as having the most moist cake in Seattle. We forgot to take a picture before we polished off the champagne cake. My apologies if you're only reading to see the pink cake but you can still see white  with raspberry filling, lemon  with lemon chiffon filling, carrot with cream cheese frosting, and chocolate cake with-- you guessed it-- chocolate frosting. Normally, Brianna will have nothing to do with carrot cake, but she actually liked theirs. Apparently, the raisins didn't permeate the cake enough to turn her away from it.

After stopping for lunch, since man can't live on cake alone, we visited a favorite bakery of mine, Madison Park Bakery. Madison Park doesn't joke around with cake tastings. They find out what flavor and filling combination in which you're interested and they make cupcakes for you. The cake here is fantastic. All of the fillings we sampled are delicious. I used the present tense "are" because we were losing steam at that point and had to bring home leftovers. We tried chocolate cake with hazelnut, coconut, chocolate fudge and chocolate mousse. (Clockwise starting at the frosting H.) Brianna had the flu and couldn't go to our original scheduled tasting a few weeks ago. The nice folks at Madison Park sent me home with some cupcakes to get started, and we rescheduled this bakery visit.

After a short stop to browse wedding bands, we ended our cake-stravaganza at our reception location, Salty's on Alki. The "Best Chocolate Cake Ever" has quite a name to which it needed to live up. This cake was rich. Fudge frosting over chocolate cake, with chocolate filling, this cake was as dense as it is delicious. Their signature "White Chocolate Mousse Cake" contrasted the other sample with a very light texture. Both cakes were fantastic, there's no question about that.

So there you have it. Our day long cake-walk through Seattle's Bakeries. Honestly, we aren't ready to make a decision yet. All the cakes were delicious. As much of a challenge as it is to eat cake four times in eight hours, it offered us a chance to compare our contenders in quick succession. No pressure here, but the cake has become a decorating focus for the wedding. If you're new to our blog, and you haven't seen the inspiration cake yet, there's a picture of it to the right.

So that's all for today. Hopefully we'll decide on a bakery soon and be able to cross another item off the wedding to do list. As for us, we're off to go for a run.

KH