Cake Tasting!

This was supposed to be a tasting, right?!  We were presented with large plates literally sagging with the weight of four giant slices of cake.  Hooray for cake!

On the left top: Vanilla cake, with vanilla custard filling

Right top: Marble cake, with praline buttercream filling, and an amaretto soak

Left bottom: Chocolate cake, with chocolate buttercream filling

Right bottom: Vanilla cake, with white chocolate and fresh strawberry filling

All the cakes have buttercream icing, since it will work better for our cake's design.
After eating more of each slice than was strictly necessary to reach a decision, we decided on incorporating (almost!) all of them.  My favorite was the strawberry one with the chocolate at a very close second, while Todd's preferences were flip-flopped.  We both like the marble but without the amaretto soak.  And (surprisingly), the vanilla custard didn't wow either of us.  

So we chose:

bottom (biggest) layer of our cake: chocolate

middle layer: strawberry

top layer: marble

anniversary cake (they package up a special individual cake for the bride and groom at the wedding): chocolate

And then, the chef came out and explained that they had baked these cakes specifically for our tasting, and we were taking the whole rest of each cake (aside from the slices we'd eaten) home!

Holy Moly! That's a lot of cake!

So, we checked into our hotel (giving the vanilla custard cake to the hotel employees at the front desk) and the next day, we had ourselves an old-fashioned cake-eating party: 
Of course, it was imperative that two members of the wedding party (groomsman and matron-of-honor, respectively) also weigh in our  cake choices for the wedding.  And they did some excellent research for the cause...
All in all, the menu and cake tastings exceeded our wildest expectations and it's a good thing that we had a few days racing around Disneyland and Los Angeles in which to burn off all of that calorific goodness!