The Sweetest Things

Whenever people talk about a wedding they've been to, they usually bring up two things - the dress and the cake. Let's talk about the latter. The Backyard Groom and I are BIG fans of all things sweet. At restaurants, we may or may not have a history of ordering more desserts than there are diners at the table. And then finishing those desserts without a problem. And I may or may not be known around my office as "The Girl Who Loves Cake."

OK, I confess. It's all true. Which makes it all the more unbelievable to people when we tell them we don't care about having a wedding cake. The Backyard Groom and I have been to our fair share of weddings, and I can count on two fingers the number of weddings that had memorably good cake. As chocoholics, it seems unconscionable to us to serve our guests subpar cake, which is all our budget could afford in the grand scheme of wedding cakery.

Instead, we plan on giving our guests the best dessert money can't buy - The Backyard Groom's Grandma's Chocolate Pie. I can't recall ever having chocolate pie before I had The Backyard Groom's Grandma's Chocolate Pie. Maybe I did, but the very act of eating this chocolate pie has erased all such impostors from my memory. It is AMAZING. It's all chocolatey gooey goodness in a buttery crust without any meringue nonsense mucking it up. I searched through 20 pages of Google images trying to find a chocolate pie that even approached the yummy sight of Grandma's but I couldn't find one so this will have to do.

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Luckily, Grandma loves us both and will usually make us a chocolate pie whenever we come over for dinner. When we asked her to make chocolate pies for our wedding, she was thrilled.

Thinking about chocolate pie got us thinking about all the other homemade desserts we love. That made us hungry, but it also made us realize that a dessert buffet might be better than a plain old wedding cake. So in addition to the chocolate pies, we plan on serving that fall staple, the pumpkin pie, alongside another Lone Star State native, Texas sheet cake. For those of you unfamiliar with Texas sheet cake, it's basically a chocolate cake that's 10 times more delicious than any other chocolate cake. I'm thinking the buttermilk might have something to do with that.

(both images courtesy of The Homesick Texan, an NYC-residing Texan who posts recipes and photos that make me drool)

The Backyard Groom's mom makes a mean Texas sheet cake. She passed down some of that baking prowess to her son, which is of course one of the myriad reasons I wanted to be his Backyard Bride. He might just grace our backyard wedding with a special rendition of his infamous peach cobbler.

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Of course, peach cobbler isn't peach cobbler unless it's topped with Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla.

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Now you can definitely see why limiting our guest list was important. How else would we have time to chow down on all these yummy desserts?

But there may soon be another sweet thing to add to the list. My mom recently unearthed the cake topper from her and my dad's wedding 43 years ago. I'm such a romantic that I don't think I can pass up the chance to reuse it, which means we may be having wedding cake after all. Don't worry though. We'll make sure it's good, even if it requires us to eat an entire test cake.