My First Catering Job

June 12, 2019 10 Comments

You all know by now that I bake a LOT. It’s my favorite thing to do and so therapeutic and soothing to me. At Christmas I bake a ton of cookies. However, I have never done anything on the scale of catering a wedding dessert table. That all changed over the weekend at the wedding of two of my very dear friends. They have had a lot of my baking over the years of our friendship and so I was floored and honored when they asked me to make their wedding desserts. Since I had never done anything like that before though, I was SO nervous about getting it all done and making sure everything was perfect for the wedding guests. I am going to take you through what I made, how it all went, and everything else about my first catering job. For any recipes that are on this blog, I have also provided the links to them so you can try them for yourself!

First of all, just look at my beautiful friends. Thom and Katy are so in love, so happy and wonderful people in their own rights. As a couple, they just belong together. The wedding ceremony was so touching and lovely.
Now to the desserts. A few days before the wedding, I started baking the things that would keep a long time. Cookie can last for over a week stored in sealed containers, so I started with the requested brown butter chocolate chunk cookies and snickerdoodles. They were pretty easy and straightforward, so they were the easiest part of the dessert table.
I also made two types of bars for the table. Since they keep slightly less well than the cookies, I made them a day later. There were 72 pieces each of my butterscotch pudding blondies and lemon bars. Again, these were fairly straightforward and simple, but a little more nerve-racking because I was so worried about making sure the trays baked through without drying out. The toothpick is always the answer.
Mini desserts are all the rage now, so they also wanted little shooters of decadent chocolate mousse. There was drama with this. My first batch of the mousse was rubbish. I let the base sit too long and it deflated. Not nearly enough air. Because it wasn’t fluffy and airy enough I also didn’t have even close to enough shooters for the table. So after a bit of panic, I just had to start again from scratch and the second batch was infinitely better. Piping them into the shooters with a flower tip gave them a nice finish that I was happy with.
Now for the centerpiece! The wedding cake was simple and elegant with two layers of chocolate cake slathered in vanilla swiss meringue buttercream. The meringue made it shinier, which I loved. This was the same cake that I made for my group of friends to sample so that I could make sure the happy couple liked it. This time, I wanted to decorate the cake with purple marzipan roses to match the wedding colors and a pretty floral border. Thank goodness for friends like my friend Ashley too. She came over the day before the wedding and spent the afternoon helping me form the marzipan roses, frost and decorate the cake. Teamwork makes the dream work and I could not have finished it without her.

Transporting it all to the venue thankfully went smoothly. Once Marc and I dropped everything off we went home and got cleaned up before the ceremony. We only live 10 minutes from the venue so that worked out beautifully. When it was time for dessert it made me so happy to watch Thom and Katy cut the cake and everyone react well to the food. It all seemed to go down a treat. I made it through and pulled it off my friends! It was a lot of work, but work I loved doing. Especially since this work was for two people I like a whole lot. The one thing I will say is that if I do this again for more clients (and I hope I do), I need another refrigerator to put in our garage. It was a huge game of tetris to get it all to fit in our one refrigerator! Hope you all enjoyed this recounting of my first catering job. xoxo

My First Catering Job
My first catering job! That’s me shamelessly posing with my work.

10 thoughts on “My First Catering Job”

  3. I want some of that mousse! It all looks amazing! I’ve been tasting lots of pastries lately for my wedding and I think it’s my favorite part haha.

  4. Wow! Everything looks amazing!!! You did awesome! Those Butterscotch Pudding Blondies sound and look divine!

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