How to Save Your Wedding Cake Top Tier for Your First Anniversary

One of my favorite things about our first wedding anniversary last month (in addition to our incredible Ojai trip) was eating the top tier of our wedding cake! If you haven’t heard of this tradition, it’s considered good luck to freeze the top tier of your wedding cake (only serving the lower, larger tiers to your guests) and then eat it—or at least some of it—on your first wedding anniversary.

I personally really dislike the taste of freezer-burned food, so I was pretty unsure how this would turn out. Would it even be edible after a whole 365 days in the back of our freezer? Somewhat unexpectedly, it turned out DELICIOUS! I was so happy with it that I wanted to quickly share how it worked in case it helps anyone else who wants to try this tradition.

The way I froze it: I placed the top tier (which our caterers wrapped up for us the night of our wedding, and Grace’s brother (and best man) carried back to his hotel refrigerator) into a large straight-sided bowl, and then fitted a large ziplock bag around the whole thing. Then I put rubber bands around the opening of the bag so that no air could get through. It was sort of a random way of packaging it, but it was the only way I could think of to cover the entire cake! The food storage containers I have just aren’t big enough, and I needed something solid and airtight. You could also purchase a large airtight container, I just didn’t think of this in advance.

The way I defrosted it: I think the method of defrosting is probably just as important as the method of freezing. I consulted my best friend on this, who happens to have gone to culinary school :) As Grace and I headed out the door to our anniversary weekend trip, I took the cake from the freezer (still in the container I mentioned above) and put it in the refrigerator. Then it had about 48 hours to slowly come to a cold, but not frozen, temperature. I think this gentle defrosting really helped preserve texture and flavor. When we got home from our trip on the afternoon of our actual anniversary, I took the cake from the refrigerator, removed the packaging around it, and placed it on a cake stand on the counter. Then it had a couple more hours to come to room temperature.

It turned out better than I ever would have expected! I honestly couldn’t tell it had been frozen for a whole year. I went into it thinking we’d just eat a couple of bites for good luck. As it turns out, we ate the entire thing over the next few days! Our top tier was a coconut-pineapple flavor, which reminded us both of our wedding and our honeymoon in Hawaii. I kept the cake in the fridge, covered, when I didn’t have it out to cut slices.

The way I styled it: Just to make it extra special, I decided to buy some small pink tulips and arrange them around the cake. I love small things like that :) Definitely not necessary, but it also was reminiscent of our wedding since our florist had styled our cake with our wedding flowers. Here’s how it looked that night:

Hard to believe that top tier is the very same one we ate last month. I also served it on a cake stand we received as a wedding gift from a family friend, so that made it extra special too!

I hope this post gives you some tips if you want to try out this tradition! If you didn’t or don’t want to save your top tier, I also think a nice tradition would be to get cupcakes in your wedding cake flavor from your baker! Grace and I plan on doing that in anniversaries to come! Our other flavors were red velvet (bottom tier) and carrot cake (middle tier). YUM!

Advice on Planning a Wedding as a Gay Couple

Reliving our wedding through many many blog posts - sixteen so far to be exact - has been so much fun, and I am so thankful for everyone who has taken the time to read about our best day. But now that all of the substantive recaps are done, I want to take a minute to pass on the wisdom we gained from doing something that looking back, was big: plan a gay wedding, essentially by ourselves, having never attended one before. I do not mean to sound cheesy, overly political, or fishing for sympathy at all. But the plain truth is that I remember in high school having NO idea if I would be legally allowed to get married, ever. Gay marriage wasn’t even 100% legal in the United States when Grace and I started dating in 2013. And neither Grace or I knew anyone personally who was gay and had planned a wedding. We didn’t really have any mentors or role models in the process. But our wedding day turned out even better than my wildest dreams, and I think I learned a lot and have a lot to share! Here are my best tips:

Overall, as a gay couple your wedding IS just like any other wedding—but know (and celebrate) the fact that it is still “different”.

I think this was one of the hardest things for me to grasp, but sweetest to embrace once I finally did. Our wedding was traditional in a lot of ways, even more traditional than many straight weddings I have been to. My dad walked me down the aisle, I wore a cathedral length veil, Grace and I didn’t see each other before our ceremony, and we had a religious wedding. Those are just a handful of examples. I think at the beginning of wedding planning, I really fought for our wedding to be “normal” and resisted anyone asking what my “partner” and I were doing for our wedding (why not fiancée like everyone else?), etc. But as time went on, I grew to love the fact that we could go non-traditional in certain ways, and I took the liberty of throwing out a few wedding traditions that didn’t appeal to me. A garter toss—no thanks. I actually didn’t even toss my bouquet because I loved it so much I wanted to take it with me at the end of the night! We didn’t do parent dances, either. We also chose to keep our wedding menu pescetarian, which has nothing to do with being gay, but is just our preference and something you don’t see at a lot of weddings. One of Grace’s bridesmaid’s dad (who was also a guest at our wedding) brought a rainbow flag and Grace waved it and danced with it during the reception, and we had some amazing queer friends vogue on the dance floor and they were SO fun. Even though I didn’t want anyone to think of our wedding as different—or less than—any other wedding, I’m so glad I was able to cherish the fact that it was different. One of a kind :)

Choose vendors carefully, but don’t get hung up on contractual language.

We were extremely lucky to get married in a part of the country where gay weddings are not uncommon. But even still, I found it important to go through potential vendors’ galleries, online reviews, and showcases and see if they had worked with gay couples in the past. This was not meant to unfairly disqualify anyone just because they hadn’t worked with a gay couple, but honestly, my sensitive heart couldn’t take the chance of being rejected. And yes, I have heard of gay couples being rejected by wedding vendors. Working with people who proudly showcase their queer clients was important to us and calmed my fears.

However, even with the most gay-friendly vendors, I often found that vendor contract language was outdated. There was pretty much always a space for Bride and for Groom. My advice is to not get hung up on this. If it was a paper contract, I’d cross it out (maybe also as a gentle nudge for them to update it for the next couple), but overall, I just let those things roll off my back. If you already know the vendor has showcased their weddings with gay couples, then personally I choose to assume the best and not worry about “standard” contractual language.

Surround yourself with your people.

I mean this in two ways. First, I LOVED having a huge wedding party (we had 10 bridesmaids each) and highly recommend it if that floats your boat. Who says you can’t have 10 (or more?!) bridesmaids! After years of not knowing if I’d ever get legally married, having so many besties stand up with me was really special and filled me with pride.

Second, when making our guest list, Grace and I wanted to be sure we had room to include as many of our queer friends as possible. Knowing that we hadn’t attended a gay wedding ourselves, we hoped to be that for some of our friends who maybe also hadn’t ever been to one. This isn’t to say we invited people that we wouldn’t have otherwise, but nonetheless this was important to us. We also made sure to express how much they meant to us in the letters we wrote each guest at our wedding.

Infuse your wedding with what sets you on fire as a couple.

I wrote a post all about the little details of our wedding, and I think that really sums up my feelings on this. Chances are, your wedding might be the first or one of the first gay weddings your guests have attended. And for Grace and me, many of our friends and family were meeting our new spouse for the first time. We dated for three years long distance and grew up on different continents, so there was pretty much no overlap of mutual old friends (except for college friends). We really tried to show our guests who we are as a couple and we took pride in the little details.

Make everything easy for your guests.

My final piece of advice is to make sure to give a lot of instructions to your guests who might be well-meaning but unfamiliar and wondering if there is anything “different” about your wedding they should expect. I made a wedding website that gave every last detail I could think of, from driving directions to nearby accommodations to details for our welcome drinks party to a heads up about our pescetarian menu. I even put instructions on our flower petal packs for guests to toss after our ceremony—extra signage and direction can never hurt, I think!

Every wedding—no matter the genders of the couple—is different, so I don’t mean to provide blanket advice for any gay wedding. But I hope this is helpful, and thank you for reading my wedding blog series! If you’re a recently engaged bride or groom to be, congrats!

All photos are by Jesse Marble and Jimmy Marble for Our Labor of Love

The Day Before Our Wedding

Before wrapping up my wedding blog series, I have to share about the day before our wedding—almost as full as the wedding day itself! Even though I saw Grace very little the day before our wedding, it was SUCH a sweet day spent with all of Our People who had flown in and traveled to be with us. Honestly, it wasn’t until the day before that things started to feel “real.”

Two days before our wedding, we checked into the Westlake Village Inn, which was absolutely lovely and Grace and I plan on going back for anniversaries in the future! It was close to our venue and the perfect setting to relax for the weekend.

The grounds at the Westlake Village Inn.

I woke up on the day before our wedding in my beautiful wedding suite with my sister (and best friend) and could NOT believe I was getting married the next day! We got breakfast and then headed out to get our manicures and pedicures with my mom. After that, we drove to Pacific Palisades where one of my mom’s best friends lives. She and my other “aunties” (my mom’s best friends from growing up) hosted my bridesmaid’s luncheon - a way to honor all the ladies who were standing up beside me on my wedding day and have some good old fashioned girl time before the nuptials. We dined on delicious food, including a cake flown in from a favorite cafe in the tiny town in Virginia where my parents have a vacation house, drank champagne, and got giddy and excited about the big day tomorrow. It was also one of my bridesmaids’ and best friend’s birthday, so we celebrated that as well.

Me with the birthday girl!

As you can see in the back of the photo above, my brother was one of my bridesmaids too! I gave all of my ’maids Plum Pretty Sugar robes as bridesmaids gifts for them to wear as we were getting ready the next day, and for my brother, I had a large white terry cloth robe embroidered with “Bride’s Butler” across the back.

Two of my oldest friends - I’ve known them even longer than I’ve known my sister!

During this same time, Grace’s bridesmaids had organized a pool party for her in one of the cabanas at the Westlake Village Inn, so she had time with all her best friends too.

After spending sweet time with our friends, it was time to go back to the hotel to get ready for the rehearsal! We rehearsed our ceremony at 5pm at our venue, which was vital to get all of our points and placements down - especially with a wedding party this large. I had a fun paper bouquet to stand in for the real one I’d have the next day.

Standing right in the spot where I’d walk down the aisle to Grace in just 24 hours!

Then we headed down to Zin Bistro for our rehearsal dinner! Because we had a huge wedding party and have big families, we had a HUGE rehearsal dinner - over 60 people - which was so festive and got us teary-eyed in advance of the big day. Zin Bistro was the perfect location right on the water.

At our rehearsal dinner, my dad gave a beautiful speech about our relationship being like two rivers meeting, joining together, and becoming stronger together than as one. My best friend (who also set me up with Grace 5 years ago) and a few of Grace’s friends also gave speeches.

We loved our rehearsal dinner food, and after we had eaten everything, we couldn’t believe we had ANOTHER event - our welcome drinks party! Our family friends from my hometown had rented out an outdoor space in the nearby Hyatt hotel (where many of our wedding guests were staying) and we had a welcome party open to all of our wedding guests. It was SO much fun to see people ahead of time and get more catch-up time with guests. We had a big wedding, so this event was really nice to be able to get more meaningful time with people. Here is the invitation our family friends sent out for our party:

If you can swing it, I highly, highly recommend a “wedding eve” party. It’s just such a fun way to extend the celebration!

It was so hard to sleep, even though I was exhausted, and I barely slept at all the night before our wedding. I couldn’t believe when I woke up—or more accurately, waited in my bed until the sun came up—it would be the day I married the love of my life.

Our Wedding: Refinery29 Feature

I am so excited to finally announce that Refinery29 has featured our wedding on its web series World Wide Wed. Full disclosure, our best friend (and one of my bridesmaids) works for Refinery29, and a couple of weeks before our wedding she asked if we wanted to have Refinery29 film our wedding and do some interviews during our wedding week. We jumped at the chance to tell a little bit more of our story than photos alone can convey, and I love how the video turned out.

Without any further ado, watch our episode of World Wide Wed below! You can also find all of Refinery29’s original series here.

Our Wedding Morning

Grace and I spent the morning of our wedding surrounded by our respective wedding parties, first getting ready at the Westlake Village Inn for hair and makeup, and then driving up to our venue for finishing touches and to get into our wedding attire.

There is an old ranch house at our wedding venue with two wings for getting ready, so Grace and I each had our own space with our bridesmaids.

The day before our wedding, I gifted each of my bridesmaids with a Plum Pretty Sugar robe to wear the morning of the wedding. I chose an all-white robe for myself and it was very festive and exciting to see everyone decked out in matching robes in the morning!

To be honest, I was much more jittery on our wedding morning than I had expected to be. I have a feeling others who have been married can relate to this, but it absolutely wasn’t jitters about marrying Grace—it was just a sudden realization of how many eyes would be on me, and as an introvert, feeling the pressure of the spotlight suddenly had me shaky. But thankfully, one of the perks of having a huge wedding party was having lots of people to calm me down.

Grace was pretty nervous too (or so I heard, since we didn’t see each other before walking down the aisle), so I was thankful that she had all her best friends to make her laugh and help her get polished for the big day!

Jitters aside, our wedding morning was SO much fun. Babies were passed around, sweet moments were shared, pre-festivities drinks were sipped (but not for me because my stomach was way too weak/nervous before the ceremony, haha!), and it was just such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have all of our best friends in our place. It was also so magical peeking out the windows and seeing our reception area coming together and floral installations going up.

Grace’s sweet parents!

When it was time to get into my dress, it was so sweet to have a few very special people help me:

My mom and sister got me into my dress

My best friend, roommate of 2 years, and round-the-world travel companion, Anna, put in my veil

My sister put on my grandmother’s bracelet that her husband (my grandfather I never met) gave her as an engagement present in the 1950s

And I put on my own shoes!

I also helped my mom get into her dress.

Before I knew it, it was time to walk down the aisle!

All photos are by Jesse Marble and Jimmy Marble for Our Labor of Love

Our Wedding: Grand Exit

One of the moments I was most looking forward to about our wedding was our final exit! I knew I wanted to do a big, sparkly exit at the end of the night.

After a fun last dance by our wedding band, our wedding coordinator got our guests lined up to send us off to our getaway car!

For a couple of reasons, the traditional sparkler exit was out—most importantly, because of California’s fire risks. I spent a long time trying to come up with a fun alternative to a sparkler exit, and I loved what we came up with.

I ordered about 200 hand-held battery powered light strands (actually wine bottle fairy lights!) and our coordinator passed them out for our guests to wave and cheer as we exited our reception.

I love this picture above sooo much—Grace grabbing my dad’s hand as we left through the tunnel of our friends and family!

At the end of the tunnel of our guests, there was a beautiful 1983 Rolls Royce convertible waiting for us! I rented the car with a driver so we could just relax in the back seat while we were whisked back to our hotel suite for the night. They even put a temporary custom decal on the back for us!

Leaving our reception in a classic car was, I believe, one of the best decisions we could have made in planning our party—it was the perfect cherry on top of our night and signaled to our guests that they could go home (or go to an afterparty, as many of our friends did!).

Definitely a “pinch me” moment, especially knowing we were leaving for Maui in just a day! I felt like the convertible floated on cloud 9 to our hotel.

All photos are by Jesse Marble and Jimmy Marble for Our Labor of Love

Our Wedding: Cocktail Hour

While Grace and I were getting some sunset portraits taken after our ceremony, our guests enjoyed a cocktail hour in our reception area. The bars were open, chilled seafood was passed, and everyone could start celebrating! Our amazing caterers served oysters, sea salt-poached shrimp, veggie burger sliders, fig and ricotta bites, and a cheese and mezze grazing station.

Our coordinator, florist, and venue hosts set up sweet details around our cocktail hour area, with little bud vases and bowls of citrus that fit with the outdoor setting of our celebration.

We also rented some vintage couches and love seats to give our guests cozy places to sit and enjoy a drink before dinner started.

Because we were off taking photos for most of cocktail hour, it was so fun to get the pictures back and see everyone hanging out and having fun!

After we finished our couples’ portraits, we rejoined our reception and were so glad to start hugging our loved ones and celebrating!

All photos are by Jesse Marble and Jimmy Marble for Our Labor of Love

Our Wedding: Sunset Portraits

After our ceremony and while our guests enjoyed cocktail hour, our photographers whisked us away for some magical golden hour portraits! We hadn’t seen each other before the ceremony, so this was our chance to get beautiful pictures of the two of us. We planned our whole timeline for the day around the light, and thankfully the sun didn’t set until almost 8pm on our wedding day.

In the picture above you can really see where our photographers drove us. On the far right of the photo, you can see a road leading up to a hilltop covered in oak trees. That’s where our wedding was held. Our photographers put us in the back of their car and drove down the hill with us so they could get some dreamy portraits in the golden grasses growing around the property. I’m so glad they did, because I’m absolutely in love with how they turned out.

In the picture above, Grace was pointing out to me that the lights of our wedding reception were starting to twinkle. I love that they captured this :)

Our photographers snapped a couple of solo shots of us too. They also had us do funny things like spin around in a circle with our eyes closed and then try to find each other and kiss, leading to pictures like this:

We had such a laid back, fun portrait session, and I was so grateful to our photographers. We chatted about leaving for Hawaii in just over 24 hours, our photographer Jesse’s pregnancy, and looking forward to eating our wedding food.

Here are a few more favorites:

Thanks for reading! I still have several posts left in my wedding series, so keep checking in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I am loving writing these, and I hope you love reading them.

All photos are by Jesse Marble and Jimmy Marble for Our Labor of Love

Our Wedding: Little Details

As gorgeous as your flowers are or as delicious as your wedding food is, I firmly believe that it’s the little personal details that will make you smile most at your wedding and that you’ll remember for years to come.

In a lot of ways, as I’m hoping to showcase throughout this wedding blog series, Grace and I felt like ambassadors in hosting the first gay wedding many of our friends and family (including ourselves!) had attended. Partly because of this, I knew I wanted to infuse our whole day with meaning and take special care for the little details that would make our day uniquely “us.”

In this post I’m sharing a few of my favorite “little details” from our wedding day. I hope they will give you a better sense of the meaning behind our wedding and perhaps give you inspiration for own your little wedding day details!

By far my favorite detail was the individual letters we wrote to each guest. As you can see in the photo above, we wrote almost 200 letters (one for each person attending our wedding) in the months leading up to our wedding and placed them in antique brass letter holders at the welcome table for guests to find before the ceremony. Yes, writing all those letters took forever, but we deeply wanted to express how much it meant to us that each person was there. Some of our guests we hadn’t seen in a long time and knew we wouldn’t get a ton of time in person with everyone, so the letters allowed us to tell everyone why we were so glad they specifically were at our wedding, and convey our excitement to celebrate with them later.

One of my law school friends finding her letter!

We had this welcome sign set up behind the rows of letters explaining that guests should find their name.

Our seating chart was also set up in the entryway area, where guests would return after the ceremony to find their seat for dinner.

While we were getting ready, our photographers took pictures of some of our personal details.

We read our vows from this sweet vows booklet during the ceremony, and I had a few of these handkerchiefs made with our wedding date embroidered on them, for happy tears. On two of the handkerchiefs, I had them stitch “Mother of the Bride” in blue above the date, and gave them to my mom and Grace’s mom before the ceremony. I figured they might need them!

My pearl bracelet in the picture above was my “something borrowed.” My grandfather, who I never met, gave it to my grandmother as an engagement present. I was honored to wear it on my own wedding day. The earrings above—from BHLDN—were my “something new” (along with my dress, veil, and shoes).

I knew I wanted a special hanger for my dress, but there are so many to choose from! I ended up going with something simple: our wedding date and a cute blue ribbon tied at the top.

Our wedding tablescapes were also simple. I wanted it to feel like a carefree summer night, so we had garlands of eucalyptus and blossoms on the dinner tables rather than large flower arrangements, and our table numbers were meant to blend in seamlessly with the rest of the decor.

One of my favorite moments of our wedding day was walking out from our ceremony through a shower of rose petals, tossed by our guests. To make that happen, we had little glassine bags of petals on each seat. I ordered custom stickers to stick on each bag, which read, “please toss as the newlyweds make their way back down the aisle!” with our initials in the middle.

I thought long and hard about whether to do a cake topper at all, but when I found out I could have custom dog-shaped toppers made, I was sold. I used this Etsy shop and was thrilled with how they turned out. Although Willie and Jellybean weren’t physically at our wedding, they were there in spirit!

I also had a gold cake cutting set engraved with our names and our wedding date that we used to cut our cake. I can’t wait to use it again when we slice into our top tier (frozen in our freezer right now) on our first wedding anniversary!

Planning these little details was so much fun, and I highly recommend using small details to bring an extra layer of meaning to your celebration.

All photos are by Jesse Marble and Jimmy Marble for Our Labor of Love

Our Wedding: Invitations & Paper

Today’s wedding post will be short and sweet, but I just had to share our invitations and ceremony programs! I love paper, cards, and invitations, and I honestly LOVED coming home after work this past spring and making progress on assembling our invitation suites every night. In the photo above, you can see we had an invitation card, a details card (with information about hotels in the area and the URL for our wedding website), a response card with a pre-stamped envelope, and a belly band with our names on it wrapping the whole thing together.

I also adore stamps and used to collect them when I was younger, so I knew I wanted to do something fun with stamps for our invitations. Because we were having our wedding in Southern California, I thought it would be fun to get some vintage cactus stamps for our envelopes. I found the ones I used on Etsy.

As for the wording of our invitation, I wanted to go traditional for the most part. If you can’t read it in the picture above, our invitations said,

The Rev. and Mrs. Kempton and Isabel Baldridge and Mr. and Mrs. Christopher and Sarah Capel

joyfully request the honor of your presence as they celebrate the marriage of their children

Grace Semler

and

Elizabeth Holland

and then the details of when and where. Because our parents’ last names were included at the top of the invitation, I used only Grace’s and my first and middle names, which I thought was sweet and old fashioned. Since our parents were very generously hosting our wedding, I wanted to make sure the invitations reflected that and put their names at the top.

I kept our ceremony programs simple and picked a style that would go well with our invitations. Rather than specifying “bridesmaids” and “groomsmen” (as we had no groom), we chose to just list our wedding party in two columns, with my people on the left and Grace’s on the right, reflecting the placement of where we stood during the ceremony.

I was so happy with the way our paper goods for our wedding turned out. This might be surprising to some, but Grace had a big hand in how they looked! I was initially drawn to calligraphy and big, script-y flourishes, but Grace encouraged me to go with something that was more straightforward, black and white, and classic looking. In the end, I totally agree with her, and I think our invitations are timeless. Thanks, Grace!

All photos are by Jesse Marble and Jimmy Marble for Our Labor of Love