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One of many decisions that needed an answer during wedding planning was "should we save the top tier of our wedding cake for our one year anniversary?" My answer to that was simple... no way! But my wife was more or less on the fence. For me, the logic of saving cake for one year makes no sense! Why spend more money for over-priced cake that will take up freezer space, which may take stale after one year! Doesn't it make more sense just to buy a fresh cake after the first year? In the end, we actually decided not to save the top tier. Serve it all to our guests!
After all was said and done, by no fault to any of our wedding vendors, we ended the night with a cake box containing the top tier. Jen's Cakes in San Jose had adding instructions on the cake box with steps to properly store cake for the one year anniversary. Our wedding coordinator at Half Moon Bay Golf Links most likely assumed we wanted to keep the top tier and never served it to our guests.
Three months has passed since we got married. We were planning on only cutting it on our one year anniversary, but after hearing advice from friends and family, decided to cut and eat it earlier. Instead of risking the full cake going stale at the one year mark, we decided to distribute our risk and eat slices of the cake quarterly! To simplify future quarters, I pre-cut the cakes into quarters (not mess in the future, just defrost and serve). We set one quarter of it aside to eat, and my wife prepared the other three quarters for freezer storage. As we later discovered, pre-cutting might be a mistake because the thick layer of cream may have been protecting the cake from frost burn.
We're happy to say at our three month anniversary, the defrosted wedding cake was still delicious! The cake itself wasn't stale at all and the jelly filling still maintained it's flavor. The cream on the outside was hardened, but that was acceptable because we usually don't eat the cream on cake anyways. Even though we did not plan on freezing cake, having the cake turn out for the better. It gave us a brief moment to not only remember our wedding day, but also provided the perfect time to discuss what we liked and dislike about living together at the three month mark. Now, regardless of how the cake turns out, we have a 6 month, 9 month, and 12 month relationship check-in to look forward to.
A couple of days after freezing the top tier of our wedding cake, we departed for our honeymoon in Bora Bora!