Weddings

We’re going to guess that every adult you know has a pile of those magical blue and white coupons. You know the ones we speak of — the coupons that automatically deduct 20 percent off one item or the total purchase at Bed Bath & Beyond.

When you’re planning and paying for a wedding, eventually you start to see dollar signs. According The Knot’s 2016 Real Wedding Survey the average wedding cost is $35,329, which leaves brides looking to save where they can. For couples set on having a cake, one way to save money is to buck tradition and skip the specialty bakery.

Whether you’re registering for your wedding or just restocking your kitchen, there are a bunch of things right off the bat that you just do not need. You do not need unitasking tools. You do not need whiskey stones. And you do not need a full set of pots and pans. Actually, ditto when it comes to knife sets. Let us explain. Buying things in sets is usually a good way to save money. A set of dinnerware is almost always going to be cheaper than buying the pieces separately.

For practically as long as I was engaged, people were telling me that I needed to be sure to eat on my wedding day. “There’s going to be so much going on and you’re going to be totally overwhelmed as soon as things are underway,” they said. “Stock up on snacks for the morning. And be sure you have someone bringing you something to eat during the wedding itself, because you’re going to forget.

Registering for your wedding is, in my opinion, one of the most fun parts of wedding planning. (To be fair, I am the sort of person who finds all parts of wedding planning fun.) When my husband and I got engaged, we each brought a scattering of hand-me-downs, mismatched cutlery, and cheapie appliances to the relationship. And much of it needed to be replaced — especially the ancient Fiestaware that had many chips and cracks, thanks to my years of sharing apartments with roommates.

The dress, the kiss, the dancing, and the cake — there’s so much wrapped up into one special day. I said “I do” just as I began a career in food 10 years ago, before Pinterest and DIY weddings were a thing. But the thought of making my own wedding cake never even occurred to me. Instead, I ordered a perfectly nice (albeit perfectly forgettable) tiered cake from a professional baker. Fast forward a decade and weddings are freer and less formulaic.

So you might’ve heard that there’s a wedding this weekend. Despite the fact that America legit fought a war to escape the British monarchy, seemingly every television channel that isn’t SyFy is breathlessly counting the minutes until Prince Charles walks Meghan Markle down the aisle and straight into the Royal Family.

Deciding whether or not you’re going to go to a wedding is never the hard part. This is your former coworker’s sister’s best friend we’re talking about. You wouldn’t miss it for the world! You even know what you’re going to wear! The hard part? Figuring out which box to check for your seated dinner. Do you want the chicken, fish, steak, or the vegetarian option? How are you supposed to know what you’ll want to eat on a Saturday in September?

Q: I’m preparing to make my own wedding cake for my wedding in July of next year. I’m planning a three-tier sponge cake and I want to fill the layers with both jam/curd and buttercream, but I’m worried the buttercream in particular will melt and the cake will slump. I’m planning to cover each layer in fondant icing.

Some people told me the idea was nuts, others weren’t surprised one bit, and some even expected it. To me, baking the favors for my wedding a few weeks ago seemed like a totally natural fit. Although what sounds great on paper doesn’t always follow a smooth path. Here’s how baking my own wedding favors really went. At first we considered not having wedding favors. As I’ve previously mentioned, I think they can be kind of a waste, and my husband very much agreed with me.

When my niece announced her wedding date, I knew I wanted to give her an extra-special gift. Without thinking too much about it, I called her up and volunteered to make her wedding cake. She was thrilled, and we immediately began to discuss possibilities, but when I hung up the phone 10 minutes later, my first thought was, “What I have I gotten myself into?” My impulse to offer the cake was pure, but the reality and responsibility of making a wedding cake hit me like a ton of bricks.

Q: I accidentally bought four pounds of salted butter through a delivery service and I can’t return it. I’m practicing baking a wedding cake, and the recipe calls for unsalted butter. I know I can freeze butter, but there is no way I would consume so much butter from day-to-day cooking or baking — I try to eat a healthy diet. Should I play around with the salt ratio in the wedding cake recipe and use the salted butter when I bake the final cake, or can I donate it?

I love Champagne. I think it goes with absolutely everything, I like it more than regular wine, and I even belong to a sparkling wine club to satisfy my bubble cravings. But when I got married, I refused to do a Champagne toast and recently advised my bride-to-be cousin to do the same. If I love Champagne so much, why did I skip the iconic wedding ritual? Let’s get this clear right away: I’m not against toasts at weddings. In fact, I love them!

In planning for my upcoming wedding, there’s one thing that slipped my mind until just recently: the wedding favors. At first I was caught off guard and truly surprised by my omission — I’ve been so organized about planning — but the more I thought about it (despite all the spreadsheets and lists), it made complete sense.

How do you decide whether to spread your feast on the dinner table, or set up a separate buffet table? And does everything go on the buffet, or does some food stay on the table? Here are my own rules for deciding when to use a buffet, and what to leave on the table. We’ve talked about buffets quite a bit before — how to set them up, how to create good flow at bigger events like weddings and parties.

This week I’m showing you the big wedding reception I catered for friends earlier in the spring, and today I want to share the menu we finally landed on. The reception took place after dinnertime, and so the food was all small bites, with cake to follow. But I knew that a lot of people probably wouldn’t eat much dinner beforehand, so I leaned towards the heavy side of appetizers. Want to see what we served, and how we planned it out?

Yesterday I explained how I catered a friend’s wedding earlier this spring, and I offered up the five questions I think you should ask yourself before tackling a project like this. I should have added one more criteria: Are you good at math? Because catering takes a lot of it. Here’s the first piece of math required — estimating and calculating how many bites per person you are going to need.

This week I’m sharing the wedding I catered for a friend last month — a big shebang with drinks and appetizers for about 200 people. It was a lot of work, and while I love catering weddings from time to time, I honestly don’t recommend it as a one-size-fits-all solution for a budget wedding. You need to make sure you have a few things in place and are up for the challenge. To that end, I always recommend people ask these five questions — ready to take the quiz?

Q: My fiancé and I are working on creating our registry, which includes items that we need and know we will use a lot. We both love to cook and are excited about upgrading some of our well-worn kitchen items, especially our pots and pans. Is it better to register for an entire set of pots and pans? Is that a more economical way to do it? If so, how do you ever decide on brand? Or should we just find the perfect sauté pan, sauce pan, fry pan, etc. for us and not worry about matching?