Ocean Cliff Wedding Show

Last Saturday Keri and I went to the Ocean Cliff wedding show. Wow, this one was so much better for us than last time. We were able to go down and set up the day before, allowing us to get there a bit later on Saturday, so we weren't as tired. We took Keri's French cake and her Blue Sea Shell cake and Emily's Sunset cake. We decided to go with really different, unique cakes to showcase, and I'm glad we did. 

The show started off slow because it actually started at Rose Cliff, then people were bussed over to Ocean Cliff afterwards. Around 1:30 it really started to pick up, we were swamped. We passed out all of our cards and gave away every cupcake (a bit of a cupcake problem occured, but we'll discuss later). We could have used about 2 dozen more cards, but we were right on for the cupcakes. We booked 6 tastings from the show and had 4 pages of sign up sheets! 

Clean up was a breeze we were out of there in 15 minutes. 

There were a few problems, but nothing major... our red velvet cupcakes were dry. We didn't refrigerated the cupcakes this time because (my theory, not proven) is that the wrappers pull away from the mini cupcakes due to the moisture in the fridge, and we didn't want this to happen. So we left them out... the chocolate bourbon and the chocolate chip cupcakes were fine, but the red velvet cupcakes had all the moisture sucked out of them by the cardboard box. The bottom of the box was dark grey with oil. I've never seen anything like it before. Obviously, refrigerating them keeps them moist and holds in the oil/butter. You learn something new every time! 

The other problem (ok, not a problem but an annoyance) was the other cake vendor. You know how you have a big sister who was there first, who all your teachers already know, who has a good reputation? You admire her for paving the way for you, you like her, but you also kind of don't like her... You are struggling for your place in this world and are fighting to not be overshadowed by her good name and reputation. You're finally confident in what you do, and she shows up and you start to doubt yourselves again? That's my relationship with another local cake company. 

They are good, they are well known, many of my friends had their wedding cakes made by this company (before I was around, of course) and the owner even talked to me personally when I was contemplating going into the business. I have high regards for them, and will refer people to them, when I can't do the cake. But still, I'm trying to make my way in the business and every where I turn, there they are. 

When we showed up on Friday to set up, we didn't see a table for any other cake vendor and we were syched! The area is set up so as you walked in the door there is a smaller round room that leads to the main room. When we arrived on Saturday the first thing we were greeted with was the other cake vendors cake dummies... a lot of them. They had that whole front room! They had the same 6' table we had, then a large middle table under the chandelier with 3 or 4 cakes on it and a photo book, then they had 3 or 4 other cakes on the piano. People were walking in and sampling their cakes right away! UGhhh!!!! There wasn't anything we could do and their cake dummies were more traditional than ours, so it was good we decided to go with the unique cakes, but it was frustrating! Oh well, I'm going to run into them time and time again, I just have to get used to it! 

I'll post pictures later... until then, eat some cake!