Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Cake is Yummy

I had scheduled two cake tastings, one for Saturday and one for Tuesday. On Saturday, we tried Plusko's Valley Bakery in Thousand Oaks. Plusko's is small, and I remembered getting birthday cakes from there when I was younger. And their wedding cakes are amazingly inexpensive. When I had called there to make the appointment, the lady claimed that they probably had the least expensive wedding cakes in all of Southern California. And I believed her. At around $2 a slice, that definitely beat out most other places. So Sam and I went into it knowing that if we liked them at all, we would go with them.

They didn't have any yellow sponge cake available for us to try (which is normally our preference), so we tried white cake with raspberry custard topped with buttercream icing, white cake with fresh banana topped with whipped cream icing, and white and chocolate cake with fresh strawberry topped with buttercream icing. Sam and I really like fresh fruit fillings, but the lady had warned us that the layers of the cake tend to shift with the fresh fruit, because the fruit is slippery. So we're likely not going with that. The samples were very good. Not "cry for more" good, but still very good. Our favorites were the white and chocolate cake, the raspberry custard, and the whipped cream. (The whipped cream was perfectly sweet and airy!) But we're taking advantage of their free tastings, so we'll be scheduling another appointment to taste the yellow cake and put in our official order. The estimate for our cake? $146 for a 3 tiered cake that will feed 70-90 people! They also charge for delivery (everybody does) and for complicated designs, so it might end up costing us about $50 more, but that's still less than $200 for a beautiful, tasty cake!

Even though we knew we'd go with Plusko's, we still went to the tasting on Tuesday to the Bread Basket, a pretty posh bakery that is famous for their wedding cakes. (Cuz, you know, who are we to pass up free cake?) It just happens to be within walking distance, so after work, we jaunted over there. They gave us HUGE samples. While Plusko's gave us cupcake-sized samples, Bread Basket gave us actual whole big slices of cake. It added up to at least half a 10" round cake. If not more. In fact, we took half of it home with us in a box! And yum, they have good samples! They gave us white cake with mixed berry filling (our favorite), white cake with chocolatey raspberry filling, chocolate cake with raspberry jam, and lemon cake with lemon filling (our least favorite). All with fluffy buttercream icing. They were all very very good. Sadly to say, they were better than Plusko's. (Though, maybe if Plusko's gave us bigger samples, we could be persuaded otherwise...) But they were also going to charge us $5 a slice for what I would have wanted. They're good, but not good enough to justify $3 more per slice. Our total came out to $410 dollars, not including the extra $100 refundable deposit for the cake stand. Yikes! So, maybe for a small after-honeymoon cake, but not for the actual shebang. Too bad.

So, Plusko's it is! I have to make another appointment with them and gather some photos of cakes I like so I can show them. Maybe I should call other bakeries and take advantage of their free wedding cake tastings too... ;)

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