Let’s face it, once of the most expensive parts of a wedding is the wedding cake. Depending on the area you live in, it can be really difficult to find someone who will be willing to make one in your budget. So what do you do?

1. Hire a student. If you do research on culinary schools near you, you may be able to recruit someone to make a cake for you. My husband and I hired an amateur baker to make our wedding cake. It turned out beautifully and it cost us a fraction of the price it would have cost had we gotten a professional. Of course, there is one rule of thumb you must follow if you’re going to go the amateur route: don’t be anal.

Amateurs can be just as good as professionals (my husband and I discovered this when we hired our photographer). But let’s face it, sometimes you’re going to get one who can’t quite figure out how to do exactly what you want. So here’s what you do. Get a picture of the cake you want in your head (or even online–we used a picture of a cake I found using Google images). If you don’t have a visual for your baker, than be as specific in your description as you possibly can. Draw it if you feel confident enough. Next, take that image and throw it away. Don’t expect your amateur baker to make the cake exactly as you want it. I know you probably have a vision going, but you have to remember that it’s only your vision. Don’t worry about how it will look to other people because they have no idea what the cake was supposed to look like. They’re still going to think it’s beautiful. As an example, here is the cake we wanted and here is the cake we got. The second is still very pretty, though the picture does it no justice.

If you don’t trust an amateur to handle your cake, though, try…

2. Making the cake yourself. This is more complicated than it sounds, but with some practice, you can do it. There are plenty of tutorials out there, including on CakeJournal. Most of what you spend for someone else to make the cake is labor. Our baker charged us per hour (and it does take a while to make a wedding cake, depending on how elaborate, so they do get a good amount of bucks just in labor). If you make the cake yourself, all you have to do is buy the supplies…and learn how to make it. If you’re not very good at baking, you probably don’t want to go this route because, let’s face it, you could potentially spend as much learning how to do it yourself as you would having someone else do it.

Another idea that’s becoming more and more popular is cupcakes. Cupcakes are so much easier to make and frost than cakes are. So I bet they’re also easier to fondant. I could be wrong, though. There are also tutorials on cupcakes. Hell, you don’t even have to worry about fondant. Cupcakes are adorable no matter how you frost them. Get a fancy cupcake display and go to town. You also don’t have to worry about cutting the cake. However, if the tradition of cutting the cake is important to you, do what many other couples are doing: get a fake cake with a piece of real cake attached at the back. You can pretend you’re cutting it and then feed it to each other. Trust me, guests aren’t going to mind. They just want cake.

The only problem with a DIY cake is that you’ll have to do it relatively close to the wedding. With everything else going on, maybe other DIY projects, you may not want the added stress. But if you have lots of lovely friends and family who are willing to help you cope, it’s not a bad idea.

3. Go out of town. If you don’t want to hire a professional and you don’t want to worry about a last minute DIY, there is one other option, though less feasible depending on where you live. If you live in a city, you’re going to be hard-pressed to find someone who will make you an inexpensive wedding cake. Research areas around where you live to see if there are any independent small-town bakers who would make your cake much cheaper than their big-city counterparts. My husband and I both come from a small town and personally knew two people who baked wedding cakes. One was his second cousin (who couldn’t do ours because of understandable complications in her own life) and the other was this wonderfully sweet (not to mention spunky) woman with whom I used to work. Those are two people we knew. I have no doubt that we would have found plenty of other people in our small town who knew how to make wedding cakes, had we done the research. So do yours. You might be surprised at how cheaply you can get your dream cake made.

4. Think “simple.” If you have no other option than to hire someone to make your cake, and you know that you’ll be stretching your cake budget to its limit, it’s best not to push it further with elaborate decor. That’s not to say you’re cake has to be boring, you’ll just need to skimp a little on the complicated things like decorative fondant sculptures. The more complicated your cake is, the more expensive it’s going to be. Instead, go out and buy some ribbon (you can find beautiful, inexpensive ribbons anywhere) and request it be wrapped around the bottoms of each tier. Rather than complicated fondant flowers, get some fake flours from the baking section of your local store (or Amazon).

There are plenty of ways to have a beautiful, elegant wedding cake without over-spending. Get creative. You’ll thank yourself later.

The easiest way to decide is to just do what you want and stop worrying about other people.  If you want alcohol, get it.  If you don’t, don’t.  Sometimes it’s not quite that simple, though, is it?

As I said, some people have had issues with alcoholism in their families.  Should you skip the open bar to keep Uncle Joe from falling off the wagon?  I’d say that depends on the rest of your family.  If your uncle drinks, he does it on his own.  By having an open bar inconspicuously placed in the corner, you are not forcing him to drink, he is making a conscious effort and was probably going to do it sooner or later anyway.  So you shouldn’t feel guilty about having alcohol at your wedding.  If you’re that worried, though, you could give your uncle’s picture to the bartender and ask that he be served a virgin daiquiri or something in place of the drink he ordered.  However, if alcoholism tends to run rampant throughout your family, skipping the bar is probably a better idea.

If the problem is that you and your fiancee don’t believe in drinking, you might want to push past that standpoint and get the bar.  You may not believe in drinking, but chances are that most of your guests do.  You can go ahead and not have alcohol at your wedding, but don’t be surprised when people leave early.  I’m not trying to be mean, it happens.  I’ve even been guilty of leaving a reception really, really early because there was no alcohol and I didn’t know anyone.  Talking only gets you so far.  No one danced because…well, they were too inhibited, thanks to a lack of alcohol. It was the most boring party I have ever been to, and it seemed I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. I was certainly not the first or last guest to leave early.

Choosing to skip the bar because you want to force your no-alcohol stance on your guests is most certainly your decision and your friends and family should respect it.  But if you want a reception to clear out quickly, there are two things you can do: schedule it for earlier in the day and refuse to serve alcohol.  Believe me, people will leave.  I realize this seems rude, but that’s just the way it goes sometimes.  You expect some of the older family members to leave early anyway because of their age, but friends?  Not so much.  But they will if they’re bored.  Alcohol is essential if you want your guests to have a good time.  On the plus side, if you don’t serve alcohol, you’ll have that much more money to use toward the music or the food or even your honeymoon (or your future!).  So if you want to save a few bucks and don’t care so much about deserters, then go ahead and skip the booze!  I’m all about saving money.

In the end, whether or not to serve alcohol at your wedding is completely your decision, whatever the reason, and you shouldn’t feel guilty about it either way.

The reason it’s so effective is that guests only care about three things: food, booze, and music.  Not necessarily in that order.  So unless decorations are that important to you (and believe me, after the wedding is over, they won’t be anymore), don’t worry too much about them because no one else cares.  No, really.  They don’t.  The only reason people are even going to the ceremony is so they don’t feel guilty about eating all your food and drinking all your alcohol.  So if you’re decorating to impress, save yourself the energy and the money.  Inviting that rival so you can show her up?  Then you should leave now, because you’re at a whole other level of crazy that I just can’t help.

Churches are beautiful on their own, so there is really no need to decorate them.  Yes, church decorations are pretty, but once your guests leave they’re not going to remember what it looked like and really aren’t going to care.  Generally when I hear from friends or family about a wedding they attended, all I hear is, “It was nice.  It was pretty.”  I know from experience that “nice” and “pretty” translate to “boring” and “waste of time.”

If your wedding is successful, what you’ll hear afterward isn’t, “It was nice, I had fun,” it will be more along the lines of, “DAMN, what a great party!” and “God, I was so wasted.” Knowing people had fun is well worth saving the money on decorations.

While making an A list and a B list is a good idea, try this first: sort into categories of family, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances.  Then, go through each of those names, close your eyes, and try to picture them.  Try to picture them next to someone else.  If you can’t pick them out of a line-up, you probably shouldn’t invite them.  It doesn’t matter if it’s some guy Dad works with or some lady Mom met at a Tupperware party.  What are they going to do?  Show up on your doorstep and demand to know why you didn’t invite them to your wedding?  If they do, just look them in the eye and calmly say, “Who the hell are you?”  That should get the point across.

With this rule, though, you should be more lenient with family.  However, you don’t have to invite everyone.  If you have no idea (or just a vague idea) who a distant relative is, don’t feel obligated to invite him or her.  A problem you may have, though, is pressure from your other family members.  One thing my mother told me was to invite everyone so I didn’t cause some kind of family feud.  In the end, I ignored her.  The family members I didn’t invite are family members that no one ever talks to, so the fear that there would be an altercation was needless.

Don’t worry about hurting people’s feelings.  If they’re decent people, they’ll understand that you have a budget and that your obligation to your family and close friends is stronger than the one you have to your co-workers.

The best thing about these splurges?  I didn’t spend that much more than I would have had I been going for the most inexpensive items.  My cake topper, which came from the Language of Love collection, was twice as much as the cake topper I would have bought at Wal-Mart.  At $30, though, it was worth it to have that little keepsake to show off on my hutch.  One thing that almost turned me off from ordering it, though, was that I had to order over the phone.  But I sucked it up and called and actually got to speak to Gina Freehill (who is such a sweet and friendly woman, by the way).  She also signed the bottom of the topper for me.  I can’t remember if that was some kind of exclusive offer, though.

Anyway, the point is that I got something that I’ll cherish forever.  So don’t feel guilty if you spend a little more than you had planned on something, especially something as small as a cake topper.  Just don’t make a habit of it. 

While planning my own wedding, I went to The Knot.  Once.  I read through an article looking for ideas on how to save for my wedding.  This website attempted to convince me that trying to spend less than $10,000 on a wedding was not only impossible, but insane.  Why would any woman want to demean herself by spending so little?  Only poor women spend so little on weddings.

Here’s the thing: I am poor.  Well, not really.  My husband is a PhD student, so we’re not wealthy.  The thing is, these websites encourage you to become the quintessential, money-grubbing bridezilla.  Ignore them.  That’s my advice, plain and simple.  Avoid websites like The Knot (notice that I have not once included their URL…that’s to help you follow my advice!).  However, if you find you must visit them, look at nothing but the pictures…if you can help yourself.  Really, it’s trying to brainwash you into thinking that the little, unimportant things are going to make the rest of your marriage wonderful.  They’re not.

Remember this: the main goal isn’t to be a bride, it’s to be a wife.  Being a bride is just one very short, insignificant stop on the way to spending your life with your husband.  It’s not about the type of ribbon you have on your invitation, it’s about “until death do we part.” Also, worrying about the little things is just going to make your wedding day more stressful.  Have fun with it!

If you do try to make these, let me know how much it cost you and how many you were able to make for that money.  It could turn out to be a nice, cheap wedding favor. 

Aren’t they adorable?  If you have your own version of this, I would love to see pictures, and I’m sure everyone else would, too!  Feel free to send me an email with pictures and instructions, if you want. 

If you want to stick with a pumpkin theme, the website offered a couple more ideas.  One was this awesome pumpkin bowl cooler.

Sweet, isn’t it?  As we all know, carving pumpkins means pulling out all of the guts and seeds.  Don’t want all that waste?  Martha has you covered (seriously, was there ever any doubt?).

Pumpkin seed favors!  If you wind up using real pumpkins, this just seems like a great idea. You could possibly roast them and put them in the bags.  How awesome would that be?

I just love the idea of using real pumpkins. The only problem is that they rot after a while, so you would have to buy them and get to work so close to the wedding. But still…if you could pull this off, how awesome would it look?  Anyone else have an interesting template or centerpiece idea?

If you happen to use any of these, pictures would be WONDERFUL.  And who knows?  Maybe I’ll host some of your wedding pictures on the blog for everyone to see. 

First, I would like to post helpful hints on how to save on weddings.  I know, I know.  Everyone does this.  But every website I visited offering to help save me money seemed to be making the assumption that I was still OK with spending $10-20k.  I was not.  I’m going to explain how to really  save money.  I think I spent $3-4k overall.  Yes, I’m serious.

Second, post some awesome wedding things that I find for you to benefit from.  Why?  Because sometimes brides get lost amongst all of the websites offering to help.  I would like to eventually have enough on this website, enough in the archives, that you can find whatever you need without having to sift through all of the crap in your Google search results.

Third, I will have a question and answer period.  Meaning, you send in a question and I answer it here on the website (or I can just email a response, if you don’t wish for your question to be published).

Fourth, I’d like for you to send me your favorite or most frustrating wedding stories.  Maybe your fondest wedding from your own wedding, a problem you had with a bridezilla at a wedding you attended, etc.  Anything you want, as long as it’s appropriate.

Hopefully this blog will be helpful to you!