Wedding Cake Tasting Part I

For the past month, we have been cake tasting. The first place we went to was Prolific Oven in Palo Alto. We tried a total of 6 different cakes - carrot cake, chocolate rum cake, chocolate mocha cake, orange almond cake, white cake with raspberry filling, and a chocolate orange almond cake. In general, the cakes were decent, although I do find them to be too sweet. Matt didn't seem to have any issue with the 'too sweet' part. Plus, the texture of the cakes is a bit more 'crumbly' that what I normally like. One nice thing is that we can pick to have 3 different cakes for the 3 tiers of our wedding cake. Overall, our favorite cake from the Prolific Oven is the carrot cake. If we were to order our cake there, we would have picked the chocolate rum, orange almond, white cake with raspberry filling, and of course the carrot cake. The designs of the cakes were alright, nothing really caught my eye. One thing that I really did not like is that they usually freeze their wedding cake after they make it, so the cake will go through a freeze/thaw cycle, and I find that a bit disturbing since who knows how much that will affect the texture of the cake. Oh, and since this was our first cake tasting, the 3 of us gobbled down all the cake and was on sugar high the rest of the day, hehe.

After that, I went to Sheng Kee, a Chinese bakery, since I really like light fluffy spongy cakes. I asked if they offer a cake tasting service for wedding cake. The lady behind the counter looked at me as if I have gone nuts! She just pointed at the cakes they sell, and said - pretty much this is what you will get - vanilla sponge with cream, chocolate sponge with cream, or orange sponge with cream. So I ended up buying these cakes and brought them home for our self made cake tasting session. I have always love Sheng Kee cakes because they have a great light texture, and the flavor is not overly powerful, plus the dosage of sugar is actually reasonable. Matt said that although they were delicious sponge cake, they were not fancy enough for a wedding cake. I do have to agree, plus the ability to get 3 different cakes did not seem to be an option at Sheng Kee.

So the hunt continued...