Blythe's Wedding Diary, Part V

Weddings are all about tradition: some from your family, some from your friends, some from society. Putting together your own wedding is all about figuring out which ones you want to keep—and which should end up alongside your recycling bin-bound stack of etiquette magazines. We decided to go a fairly conventional route (big church, country club reception, seven groomsmen and seven bridesmaids). Most of those decisions were based on convenience, and budget, and putting together a day that would give us the most time possible with the people we never get to see enough.

But just because we chose a, well, traditional set-up, it doesn’t mean we’re giving up on the details. We’ve been picking and choosing our favorite wedding pieces based on the 12+ weddings we’ve been cordially invited to in the last five years, trying to arrange them into a finished puzzle that works for us.

Garter and bouquet toss? No, thank you. Unity candle? We’ll pass. Parent dances? Something slightly up-tempo, please, and no tears. We’ve bypassed the standard guest book for a scrapbook with space for our friends to leave notes. Our bridesmaids chose two different colors of dresses, so three will wear red and four, black, and the groomsmen all got dark gray three-piece suits. But we look forward to reciting the same vows our parents said; lining up the family for a timeless group shot; and making a grand entrance into the reception (even though we’ll do our pictures before the ceremony and we'll greet our guests during the cocktail hour).

Then we got to the cake. After more tastings and sketches and meetings than I can count, we still couldn’t find a place that could make our three-tiered, present-shaped cake for less than $900. But the problem is, we don’t really care so much about cake—especially wedding cake, which is so often a dry, boring base for an architectural miracle of too-sweet icing. (Note to cake-lovers and professional bakers: we are, on the whole, pro-cake and rarely turn down a slice at a wedding; it just turned out we didn’t like it enough to spend almost $1,000.) So we asked around a bit and found a neighbor with a professional pie-baking business who agreed to make us 200 three-inch, individual tarts in cherry, lemon, apple, and pumpkin.

They won’t have quite the same visual impact as a towering stack of square cakes—and some of our more by-the-book relatives are still getting used to the idea—but Mike and I are so excited about it. I’m actually hoping that they’ll be so successful that we just may start a new tradition: wedding pie.