Creating a Dessert Table

This is my first post as a married lady!  Kyle and I had a fabulous wedding with our friends and family on April 25^th and I am so excited to share everything about it.  When the professional pictures come back, there will absolutely be a long post recapping the day and giving some tips, but while we wait, I figured I’d craft a few post of some budget-saving tips that were a huge success.

This week: our dessert table.

Kyle and I are dessert people.  We panic every time we run out of sweets at the house and I come from a long-line of bakers, so having a variety of delicious treats was a priority for us.

Our first major decision was to skip the large cake in favor of cupcakes.  We had a few traditionalists who were unsure about skipping the cake, but nobody cared the actual day of when they were stuffing their faces with delicious chocolate cupcakes.  Typically, cupcakes will be cheaper than cake because you can avoid any cake cutting fees and it is easier to judge how many you need (going up a size in cake “just in case” is more expensive than ordering a dozen extra cupcakes).  We took the savings ever farther, since my mom offered to bake the cupcakes using my late grandmother’s recipe.*  It was such a sweet gesture and everyone was impressed with the look and taste!

Since Kyle grew up in Pittsburgh, it was important that we have a cookie table at the wedding (read more about the Pittsburgh tradition here!).  Although all of our Western-PA guests expected the cookies, the guests who were unfamiliar with the tradition were pleasantly surprised that we had cookies at our wedding.  My Aunt Jenny* was amazing and offered to bake all of our cookies using more family recipes and Kyle’s grandmother brought some decorated sugar cookies from our favorite bakery from Pittsburgh!

Because we did not have a large cake, we were also able to use cake stands and cookie jars we already owned as another cost saving measure!  I designed the cookie labels using Publisher and printed them myself and made all the cupcake toppers myself out of tissue paper.  The center cake was probably our only splurge on the table!

The dessert table turned out delicious and gorgeous and I wouldn’t change it for anything.

Are you having a dessert table?  What desserts are you serving/would you serve?

***My mom and aunt are bakers.  My aunt works in a bakery and my mother a restaurant–they both also bake as a hobby and have for their entire lives.  They already had the practice, equipment and space to bake everything that was needed.  I do not recommend this much baking if you don’t have the experience!