San Diego is a real military town and there are several military bases that have wedding venues on them.  To be able to use one of these venues, you either have to be in the military or have someone who is / was in the military sponsor you.  As I understand it, these venues are significantly less expensive than most venues which is one of their main appeals.  All the venues have something to recommend them and something you might have to compromise on in going with that particular venue.  I plan to eventually blog on all the major military venues, but today I’ll talk about the Oceanview Room at the Point Loma Sub Base.

The sub base is at the end of Point Loma on the east side.  The Oceanview room is at the end of the base — you can look up and see the Pt. Loma lighthouse and look out towards the opening of the San Diego Bay and onto the Pacific Ocean.  Honestly, the room itself isn’t anything to get too excited about, though when I delivered there last weekend, the whole building was undergoing renovations except for the Oceanview Room itself.  Perhaps the Oceanview Room is in store for some renovations, but I don’t know.  It really doesn’t matter.  The reason people want to book this venue is not the room itself, but a fantastic deck right on the bay/ocean.  The deck was redone a couple of years ago and is quite spacious.  Most weddings I deliver to there have all the tables set up on the deck — the room itself is merely used as a buffet station for guests to get their food and then go back to the deck.  There’s also a nice lawn area beside the deck where most couples get married prior to the reception.  Of course, with a winter wedding, you’ll be inside the room itself, but you’ll still have a great view of the ocean.   Of all the military venues, this has the best ocean view setting.   If you’re on a little bit of a budget (and who isn’t these days) and you have some military connection, I certainly recommend checking out the Oceanview Room.  But book early;  they sell out more than a year in advance generally. Here’s a link to their website:  http://www.sdbg.com/oceanview.php

Amanda and Justin got married at the Oceanview Room weekend before last.  They were a really nice couple and she wanted a simple cake — plain iced sides, white on the top and bottom tiers and grey on the middle tier with a black ribbon at the base of each tier.  There were some white orchids for me to place on the cake when I delivered it.  It’s a clean, simple cake that should never look out of style.  Sometimes, simple is beautiful.

Okay, so I broke my vow last week to have at least one blog post a week.  But we’ve been so freaking busy, I just didn’t find time.  It’s funny – if I just look at our business I think the economy is doing great.  Honestly, we’ve never been busier overall.  Then if I watch the news, I think the sky is falling and we’ll all be eating boiled shoe stock in a few months.  So I concluded ignorance is bliss and decided just not to watch the nightly news.  We’re crazy busy right now and I’m very grateful for that.  Believe me, I’m grateful.

So here are a few cakes from this past weekend.  Maybe I’ll cover some of the wedding cakes from this weekend in a later post.  But for now, here are some of the more intersting non-wedding cakes we did over the weekend.

First, the Kansas City Chiefs were in town to play the Chargers, so someone from Kansas flew to San Diego with his family for the game.  It was his son’s birthday, so he ordered a Kansas City Chiefs helmet.  Hopefully, the kid liked it as I’m sure he didn’t like the game.  Chiefs lost, Chargers won.

Then we had two tiered cakes for little girls — one with a Disney Princess theme and the other a Tinkerbell cake they wanted in lime green, purple and yellow.  I hope the girls loved their cakes;  I was happy with both of them.

Then we had two milestone birthdays — a 40th and a 70th.  The 40th was a rather general masculine cake we delivered to the Tilted Kilt downtown.  If you’re looking for a quiet place to celebrate your birthday, you probably want to look somewhere besides the Tilted Kilt.  Jim was turning 70 and is a retired Naval officer.  He use to command the USS Safeguard and loved his time in Hawaii, so his family wanted a cake with him on the beach in Hawaii with two Hula girls and his former ship off shore.  It was a fun cake that Emily did a great job on. 

So without further ado, here they are:

We survived 9.10.11!!!   This past Saturday was THE day to get married this year.  I guess a lot of couples liked the idea of their wedding being on a date that’s 3 consecutive numbers — 9, 10 and 11.  Now they have no excuse for forgetting their anniversaries.  It ended up being the busiest day we’ve ever had at Twiggs.  If that wasn’t challenge enough, all of San Diego County lost power 2 days before due to some single worker in Arizona making some error.  Fortunately, power was only off for about 7 hours for us and all the cakes survived. 

One of the wedding cakes we did this past weekend was for Julia and Jason who got married at the Estancia Hotel up in La Jolla.  I’ll definitely have to have a separate post talking about the Estancia as a wedding venue, as it’s one of my favorites.  But this post is about their wedding cake.  They had a tile design they wanted incorporated into their wedding cake.  The design was way too intricate to try to replicate with fondant or buttercream, so we printed edible images and put these on fondant bands that ran along the base of each tier.  I thought it turned out really great and was certainly unique.

Krystal came to the Twiggs booth at a bridal show back in July and fell in love with our white velvet cake.  She was providing the cake for her sister’s wedding and wanted to get it from Twiggs.  Great!  One little issue . . . the wedding was on the beach in South Carolina.  I initially told her to forget it because we don’t ship our cakes.  She said she would take them as carry-on luggage.  I thought she was nuts, but she was determined. 

I told her she’d have to get a fondant covered cake for that sort of travel.  We reinforced our boxes with cardboard and packed the two tier cake for 50 in two separate boxes.  She’d need to unpack the boxes and stack the cake when she got to South Carolina.  Here’s the e-mail I got from Krystal along with a picture of the cake.

that cake was wonderful from the first time we tried it.  It was a great trip! Everyone from Restaurant staffs to flight attendants and hotel workers were super supportive. 
I didn’t have to open the cakes at the airport though everyone was interested to know where it was going and what it was. i was a little nervous about the plane because I wasn’t able to change my flight and I wasn’t sure if it would be ok for the length of the entire trip (15 hours). On the first flight, the flight attendants gave my dry ice to put between the boxes and a great place to store them (in first class).  While at my layover (3 hours), I was able to put the cakes in the walk-in of an airport restaurant. The final flight, I just put it over-heard.  When i got my car rental I checked to make sure they were ok. I just had to adjust them a little bit from the movement on the planes.  I drove the whole way from Charlotte to Myrtle beach with the air conditioner on about 60.  I was cold but the cakes were perfect.  it was too hot and muggy outside to ride with the windows down anyway. As soon as I got to the hotel, they knew I was coming so I just rewrapped the boxes and carefully placed them in the walk-in until the reception. It was nerve wracking because Delta can sometimes be a pain when it comes to customer service. But God really helped out, because practically everyone was so accommodating.  I carried on all my luggage, but on the last flight I had to check my bag because the flight attendants counted the cake as a carry on. It was fun to travel with the cake but hopefully I wont’ have to do it again. Thank you so much for the awesome cake.  It was enjoyed by everyone.
 
Sincerely,
Krystal

About 5 years ago I did my first wedding that wanted cake centerpieces for each table rather than the traditional stacked cake.  The couple really gave me complete freedom with the designs.  I sat down with them and they said “here’s our colors, here’s generally what we like; Surprise us.”  I ended up having a blast doing the cakes, they were thrilled and I ended up with 2 other wedding cake centerpiece bookings from two couples who attended that wedding.

It’s really a fun idea.  You can have different flavors and different designs on each table.  The cakes become a conversation piece at the wedding.  Then when it’s time to cut the cakes, it encourages people to interact with other tables as people search out different cake flavors.

I’ve done probably 15 or so of these weddings over the last few years.  Some brides give me complete freedom.  Others want to approve each design and color scheme.  Either way is fine with me.  Honestly, you end up spending more on cake than you would otherwise, but you save a lot on flowers since you have cake centerpieces rather than floral centerpieces.  We also leave a cake box for each cake as there’s almost always leftover cake with this arrangement.  Rather than take a floral centerpiece home, your guests (at least a few of them) get to take cake home.

Last weekend we did wedding cake centerpieces for Deborah and Matt. They had an outdoor wedding at the San Diego Botanical Gardens in Encinitas (formerly Quail Botanical Gardens).  The gardens are beautiful and Deborah wanted to tie in the nature theme to her centerpieces, so they all included some sort of plant life.  Below you’ll find pictures of four of their cakes. 

So if you’re thinking outside the box for your wedding, think of having Cake Centerpieces for your tables rather than florals.

Regular readers of this blog (which I believe there is only one — me) know that I plan to occasionally discuss different venues in San Diego as we deliver to them.  This post is about The Abbey located on 5th Avenue in Banker’s Hill one block away from Balboa Park.  The Abbey is actually operated by Hornblower Cruises.  The Abbey / Hornblower sell wedding packages that include a wedding cake.  Twiggs is one of the vendor options for supplying the wedding cake, so we deliver to The Abbey quite often. 

The building started life in 1910 as the Park Place Methodist Episopal Church.  It’s a gorgeous space built in the Spanish Colonial Revival style and is now on the National Historic Registry.  It long ago ceased being a church, but still very much has that feel inside.  A gold-leafed Gariel blowing his horn tops the building and beautiful stained glass windows adorn the inside.  It can accommodate up to 300 guests and is a perfect venue if you want everything in one place — ceremony and reception.  It’s a little dark inside, but for evening weddings it’s perfect.  You also have the building to yourself, so you’re not competing with other weddings in adjoining banquet rooms like many hotels.  Hornblower also has a great reputation for great food, so lots of foodies book this place.  

Check out the Abbey and pictures of the venue at their website:  http://www.abbeyweddings.com/

Meanwhile, of course I have to plug Twiggs as well.  Deana and Luke got married at The Abbey this past Saturday.  The design they chose was one we’ve done several times now.  Fresh calla lillies wrap around a single pedastal that supports the top tier.  A ribbon is wrapped around the base of each tier and fondant balls rolled in Super Pearl Lustre Dust surround the base of each tier.  The first time I did this cake, I spent about an hour and a half trying to figure out how to attach the stems to the pedastal without destroying the flower.  Now I’ve got it down.  This one took me about 5 minutes.  So here’s the picture;  it’s a simple, but beautiful cake.

Here at Twiggs we probably do more Kid’s cakes than any other kind of special order cake.   Parents especially seem giddy about celebrating their child’s first birthday.  We easily get more 1st birthday cake orders than any other birthday.  Doing kid’s cakes really keeps you up to date on what the current kid favorite shows are.  I remember the first Yo Gabba Gabba cake we did; I had to ask the mom to repeat the name “yo gabba gabba” about 3 times before I got it.

This past weekend, however, was old school kid’s cake weekend.  We did a cake with Dino and Bam Bam from the Flintstones;  I didn’t realize anyone still watched that.  And then we went real old school with a Winnie the Pooh cake.  Finally there was a tiered cake featuring characters from Super Mario Brothers.  I realize Super Mario Brothers isn’t THAT old school, but it has been around for a while.

I love doing kid’s cakes.  They’re my favorite cakes to do because they’re generally so whimsical and fun.  We do all our figures by hand from fondant.  It’s obviously far more time consuming than putting on a plastic figure, but when it’s done it looks like a real cartoon on the cake, which I love.  So here’s to old school kid’s cartoons.