Cupcake Picks (and I don't mean flavours)

As a quick preamble, my apologies for my absence as of late. We've taken off on a little vacation to Vancouver to visit friends, and right now we're in Whistler while Dan snowboards and I'm wandering about taking in free concerts and the general ambiance of the Paralympic Games. It's pretty amazing here and it's spectacular to see various athletes walking around Whistler Village in their team uniforms, knowing how proud and excited they must be. We're having an absolute blast! 


Back to wedding related items though. Our bakery kicks some serious a$$. Their cake flavours are out of this world and I can hardly wait to totally pig out at our wedding! I wanted to make our cupcakes a bit more personalized though and decided to make little picks to match our invitations. It was pretty straight forward. First, I bought Avery round stickers from Staples ($18.22). Next, I popped over to Micheal's and bought some wooden sticks, I think they were about 4" long and cost about $1.50 with my 40% off coupon. 

 (This is on the top of our invitations, my inspiration)

Now for the more complicated bit. Because I wanted to make our picks match our invitations, I had to do them in Illustrator. Thank goodness for Google and this guy who created the template and uploaded it to the interwebs for the rest of the world to us. Thanks guy! 

Next, I grabbed my Elevator Buttons font that I'm using on the top of our invitations and started plopping in buttons. I played with the size of the font until it matched the circle circumference. I don't like the actual font inside the buttons, so I had to place a white circle over the font (use the shapes tool on the side bar and make sure to colour match the white of the circle to the white of your background using the eyedropper tool). 

Next, I put in the correct font for the numbers and little sayings matching our invitations.

For the back of the picks, I made a sheet just of our names and wedding date in our elevator buttons using the same template. Pretty straight forward.

And now, print! I test printed a few times, moved the buttons around to try to line it up with the test print circles, and was generally frustrated to no end because each time it printed differently. Then I decided to bite the bullet and print on a sheet of the stickers. Trust me, keep everything aligned to the template no matter what it looks like on your test print. The sticker paper is thicker and while it won't print 100% perfectly, I was willing to settle for 98%. I only needed about 60 of them, and I had 400 stickers so I printed one extra page of each side which worked out perfectly. 


Assembly is simple. Take a stick and sandwich it between your front and back stickers. 

Ta da!!!! Total project price was less than $20 and I have round stickers left over for other projects. Maybe seals for our doggie bags?

I'll drop these off to the bakery along with our cupcake wrappers (more to come on that one!) about a week before our wedding. Hooray! I'm so happy with the results!

Cupcakes make the world happy

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Hello, my name is Veronica and I am a cake addict. I will eat it both in regular and cup form. I don't even need a plate. Give me a fork and the platter.

You can imagine my glee when I attended my first wedding show and got to sample cake from about 10 different bakeries. I have no shame, I broke the cardinal rule and asked for a sample of each flavour. See addict admission above. I repeated said behaviour at my second wedding show which resulted in many sugar high giggling fits while crammed in tiny photo booths with my sister.

Sorry, back to the point. One particular bakery really struck my fancy, The Wedding Cake Shoppe. They had an entire four tier cake covered in conversation hearts. Cake AND candy?! Are you kidding me?! On top of appealing to my serious sugar addiction, their spicy chai latte cake sample was some of the best cake I have ever eaten. Period. I start every day off with a chai latte and now you're going to give it to me in cake form?! Obviously I signed up for a consultation on the spot (of course after making a huge fool of myself gushing over their cake flavours and the adorable Japanese cake toppers).

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Finally sampling day arrived. Best. Day. Ever. Dan and I showed up hungry and excited. We met with Aleksandra who helped us delineate what it was that we wanted. To be honest, we didn't even want a wedding cake. I just really really really loved their cake, and having a wedding was a great excuse to buy one! After looking through lots of books of photos with cakes they've made previously, we decided the common thread was a "natural" sort of vibe. Branches, leaves, birds, that sort of thing. I honed in on one in particular when Aleksandra mentioned it had been created to match the graphic on the invitation. Reeeeeeaaaalllly. Screw the birds, I want a cake that matches my invitations!!!! I haven't yet posted about this, and I promise I will soon, but our invitations are based on the fact that Dan and I met in an elevator.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are having an elevator mini cake! That's right, two tiers of cupcakes (60 total), capped off with a two tier mini cake that looks like an elevator! SWEET! Now I'm not going to give everything away since I want to DIY a few things and post tutorials for you, so stay tuned for the details of how I'm going to make my cake even more wonderful and personal! If you haven't guessed it by now, I'm a little excited! And do you know what else makes me excited?! How amazingly well priced it all was! Our full bill ended up being less than $400 including $130 delivery, and a $30 cupcake stand rental. Ummmm SCORE! I can't recommend the ladies there enough, they are so sweet and charming, really gave us lots of time, and had great ideas. I can hardly wait to pick up another 6 pack of flavours so we can finalize them for the wedding!

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