In Summer Wedding at the Second Chance Sweet Shop, Jamie and Fin are preparing for their big day, but as we have learned to expect in Holly’s world, things never go off without a hitch. (See what I did there?) As such, I thought it might be fun to share one of my own wedding mishaps which had an unexpectedly wonderful surprise ending. (Besides getting married to my incredible husband.)
It is now nearly 15 years since Jake and I got married on the beautiful island of Koh Samui. We were living in Thailand at the time and so invited our friends and family out to spend a week in a villa there. Arranging a wedding at any time can be difficult and stressful but even more so when people are travelling halfway across the world to reach you and you don’t speak the language; luckily, we had the incredibly helpful manager of the villa, Kitty, on hand to help us sort everything from the flowers to the officiant, to the wedding cake. And that is what this story is about.
It was only a small wedding, and Jake and I wanted to keep things simple. That included a small white cake decorated with some pink orchids to match the flowers we were having for the day. I sent photos to both Kitty and the baker who was doing the cake and all was good. Until the wedding day when the actual cake arrived.
Rather than this petite, simple, white cake with orchids, we received three tiers of bright pink fondant, covered with pink hearts and stars. At first, we thought it must be a mistake, and suspected that this was somebody else’s cake. But the baker who made the creation simply grinned at us and said,
“But this is so much better than what you wanted, isn’t it?!” And so we had a very, very pink wedding cake as you can see in the photos.
Being us, we saw the funny side, and let’s be honest, cake is cake. A bit of food colouring wasn’t going to stop us from enjoying it.
Now, until this year, I’d thought that this was where the story ended. That we would always have this little anecdote of a bright pink wedding cake, but in February it was my 40th birthday and a dear friend who runs a baking business made me a cake. When I saw it, I couldn’t believe it. It was simple and white and covered in… you’ve guessed it, pink orchids. It was the wedding cake we had asked for, but never received. This friend had no idea about this story, as she is someone I have only met since I moved back to the UK and she hadn’t spoken to Jake about even making a cake for me, let alone the design. But somehow, through luck or fate, or whatever you may wish to call it, that was what she decided to create for my birthday. It’s a funny old world, isn’t it? So there, with my story done, it’s time you go read about Jamie and Fin’s wedding instead.
