OK, so we did our first cake tasting on Sunday at Ithaca Bakery. All was well; the cake guy is really nice and easy to work with; the cakes look professional; they're not too expensive; it tasted good (frosting was a little stiff but hopefully once the cake is room temperature it'll be softer). So we were happy with them but I had already set up a meeting yesterday with a wild card to give us a second option.
The name of the business is Dottie's Cakes and I met Dottie at a local bridal show and sampled the cake, which was good. I should have known this was going to go badly though. First of all, I emailed her last week to try and get more information about tasting and she sent an email back to me a couple of days later that said, Please call; I have limited time on the internet. Okay....I called and she got back to me about 5 hours after I left a message. We discussed the flavors we wanted to try and she gave me directions to her place. She doesn't have an actual cake shop (which is what I originally thought), but does everything out of her house but assured me that she has a second kitchen for cake tasting and it's passed health inspection and all of that.
Once we arrive at her farm, a guy in the yard tells us to go on in but watch out for the dog. We open the door and there is the biggest, hairiest dog you've ever seen in your life in the doorway. The whole house smells like animals. (I'm not a big animal person to say the least.) The hallway is dirty and cluttered and there are two kids in the room who are watching tv. I tell them we're looking for Dottie and then she comes out. I introduce myself and FI. She looks like she has no idea what we are doing there. Then she asks us if we had a cake tasting, I say yes, and she says, oh no, I wrote down that it was next Tuesday. I'm happily ready to hightail it out of there and never come back, but she insists that we can still do it.
So we sit down at her dining room table and she putters around getting everything ready including taking cake out of a refrigerator (who knows how long it had been there b/c she clearly did not bake it for us!) and mixing little pots of filling and frosting. She puts everything down separately on the table. So it's our job to put the frostings and fillings on the pieces of cake in whatever combination we want. Kind of difficult but okay. The cake is good, but I can barely eat it because I'm so uncomfortable with the animal smells and stuff.
We talk about the cake itself; she refuses to listen to what I'm saying about certain things, like: No, we will not be saving the top half of the cake for our 1 year anniversary. She would say, oh, of course you need to do that; everyone should save their cake top! I tell her I don't want fruit in the cake and she tries to convince me to have it. I have a picture of a cake with a colored band of icing around the bottom of each tier and she insists that that cannot be made with icing and that it would need to be actual ribbon. What?! And on and on.
As this is all going on, I'm wondering how we can possibly get out of this as quickly as possible. I even thought about just leaving in the middle saying, I'm very sorry, but this isn't going to work out. But I didn't. (FI told me later that he was relieved I didn't do that b/c it would be so rude, but I still think that might have been the better course of action.)
So there was no charge for the tasting, but at the end she tells me that she would like to get $100 from me right then to book the date. I said, I'm sorry, but we have a meeting with someone else as well and can't make a decision right now and that I would call her next week. After I refused to give her the money, she seemed annoyed.
After we left, my FI asked me what I was thinking making this appointment. I knew it was a little bit of a wildcard, but she hadn't seemed so odd when I met her and there were other people there so it seemed like a legitimate business at the bridal show. And it was cheaper than most of the places around here, clearly with good reason.
Soooooo, Ithaca Bakery, you are making my cake!! And I will be returning your contract tomorrow.
