Commanded by the Queen

Fascinating. In the sense that the word "commanded" does seem to make the word "invite" a misnomer of sorts, no?

The Dark Bride

The movie Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows will be released this fall. The wedding scene featured in this picture is the most closely guarded cinematic secret of the Halloween season. The Los Angeles Times danced around the moment with costume designer Jany Temime here, it is worth reading. You will also find the typically darkly irresistible and arresting movie trailer there.

I can't help but wonder what that cake must look like; the fantasy of this series has been so accurate and compelling, what would do the dark trick there?

I digress.

Regarding Temime's comments: I have to hope it is not too light and confectionery. I like my weddings a little more dark, with a little more edge.

After all, I too was an October bride.

The Virginia Gent wedding tradition

A friend of mine was married here in Middleburg this past weekend. The week before, he said, "We're pretty much ready to go, we buried our bottle today, so there is not much left to do."

I cannot help but cherish the tradition of old Virginia families gathering together before a wedding to bury a bottle of Virginia Gent Bourbon in the garden for, "the hard times ahead."

I wished him the best; it is heartening to know that in a pinch, he has an old friend and a bit of his family's luck and love resting in the garden next to house.

And for all those not in Northern Virginia, it couldn't hurt...

Fit for a rodent

Why, in all those nostalgic European travel posters, does the villager carrying a jug of wine hold a chunk of cheese in the other hand? Because after hundreds of years of unconditional trial and error, Europeans came to understand that cheese somehow made wine, especially cheap red wine, taste better. Like milk in strongly tannic tea, cheese tempers the harshness of the tannin in the wine.

(There's an entertaining tip here. As clever caters have always known, no one will notice the shortcomings of an inexpensive wine as long as enough cheese is served along side.)

- The Wine Bible, Karen MacNeil (2001, Workman)

Wine and cheese have been on my mind because I have had reason to look over a great many cheese displays lately (don't ask, I get my nose into a lot of things, curious as a cat...). And frankly, mulling over cheese displays is a lot more rewarding than insipid Mommy-one-upmanship on the local playgrounds. So, I'm not self-conscious.

Cheese. And wine. Good or bad cheese and fabulous or box wine, what have you; in flipping through the Wine Bible I am now clear on why they go together, only in many cases I very much want them to stop going everywhere together. What a colossal unforgivable mess.

Not one person within my key stroke right now does not know what I mean: These aesthetically disastrous mounds of cubed cheeses on displays which are tasteless cost-club hunks butchered into bite-size pieces of ick with a side of grapes and strawberries. I was able to find hoards of these photos from nearly every caterer with a website. Stop them, this is not pleasing. I mean it, stop it right now.

I imagine this creation must be called "Cheese as Landfill" or "Brie Dunes with Ocean of Pepper Jack" ahhhh, the pure genius... Tell me, what one of us hasn't been there and got the old tie or bridesmaid gown in "periwinkle" to show for it, eh?

Had that absurdity appeared at my wedding I would have stood on a banquet chair, holding up my gown while shrieking and pointing until someone determined I was not wailing at a rodent but, moreover, a cheese display only suited for one.

Now then. Whether you or your cater is serving the cheese, the guests are best served when someone takes a genuine interest in finding very good cheeses and not hacking them up into nibbly bits the night before. Cutting the cheese prematurely and refrigerating it is the surest way for it to be flavorless.

There is a better way: Leave the cheese in large hunks, offer cheese knives and allow the guests to serve themselves; You have now avoided the unappealing cheese landfill display and those mealy hunks still taste like cheese. Which is, I assume, the point of all that cheese in the end.

Don't you feel more serene and happy looking at this shot below? Don't you feel some hope regarding the cheese offered? Doesn't it make you want to eat cheese at parties again?


Other useful hunks of information:

A complete list of agreeable pairings is available at Gourmet Sleuth, but generally, these rules of thumb will get you through the pre-party shopping painlessly:

Pair wine and cheese of the same region together.

Pair salty cheese with sweet wine: Stilton with Port.

Pair creamy cheeses with tannic red wines; creamy, soft-ripening cheese, such as red Bordeaux with triple cream brie-types.

Pair acid with acid: Sauvignon Blanc and goat cheese.

Pair rich cheeses with champagne and sparkling wines.

Thing of Beauty: The Wedding Cakes of Jason Reaves

These staggeringly beautiful wedding cakes are the product of the talented hands of Pastry Chef Jason Reaves of Market Salamander, Middleburg, Virginia.




Neither Market Salamander nor Chef Reaves are sponsors of this site.

What they ate: The wedding reception of Beyonce and Jay-Z

Her 2010 Grammy's dress seems to be able to start a furor all on its own.



But another furor was the couple's absolute lock down on details related to their 2008 nuptials. Although a couple of guests were willing to dish on parts of the seven course menu including beluga caviar, shrimp scampi, and buckets of Popeye's fried chicken.

After all, serve what you love, you might even get to eat it.

Not just for weddings

I was awestruck by these cakes featured in Charleston Weddings and wish they had occurred to me six years ago. While they are featured in the local wedding magazine, it seems we, as a society here, serve cake on every occasion, not exclusively for weddings (the same is true of punch and canapes, but that is another day). It is refreshing the decorators took these cakes to a new, entirely sophisticated and clean level by doing ever so little to the cake and choosing instead to perfect the select sugar flowers. Magnificent, in my humble estimation. I will have the camellia...

Prices are included as a reference for those planning a wedding.

Confederate Jasmine.

The Camellia - just my style: Sleek, with fine, fast lines and a clean floral.

The Magnolia is beautiful but the unfortunate choice of adding leaves to the middle layer really did it no favors: More flowers, fewer leaves. The rusty factor of the real late-on magnolia could have been addressed in the sugar work as well and kept the cake neat and clean.

Prices, locally: Jasmine, $450. Camellia, $750. Magnolia, $1750.

Charleston Weddings, is a big, glorious mag worth a subscription for anyone planning events, anywhere.

The Receiving Line

Receiving lines are intended to be the greeting of the guests by the hostess and guests of honor at an event. We see them most often at weddings these days where one can wait more than an hour not to be greeted by more than half the receivers because they do not know them personally and do not know how to manage the guests through the line.

The Hostess has been all for being rid of the receiving line, ever since, as a young guest at the Black and Gold at West Point, she stood in a receiving line of decorated military dignitaries for one and half hours in three inch heels. At least they knew the etiquette which is nothing short of a miracle in these times.

If you are considering a receiving line, there are a couple of things I want you to know:

It is your wedding, greet me casually if you like. A simple smile and nod and coming down the isle in between photos is enough. There is just no reason we need to stand in 100 degree heat for an hour to exchange the kiss of peace.

Secondly, a receiving line takes an awfully long time to complete so you will need to plan for it: 45 minutes for every 200 guests, that is if you are moving with infantry-like swiftness and your receivers know the drill well, no pun intended. The Hostess has been a victim of the 400 person line and is glad she lived to relate these tales to you.

Finally, best to have a drink or cocktail and a canape service if you plan to keep anyone lingering for an hour. At one memorable wedding, the Hostess nearly passed out in a sweltering Methodist camp in Oregon from a lack of hydration and the exhaustion from the around-the-world in a day journey to Corvalis. Be thoughtful, about the standing around and the air conditioning.

The drill then, is as follows:

No guest should be cold-shouldered or ignored because your Dad does not recognize him. The etiquette is that the hostess or host at a wedding, generally the Mother of the Bride, is the first in the receiving line. She greets the guests, being sure she has their name correct, turns to the receiver on her right and introduces the guest to the next person on the line by their complete name and affiliation. Each consecutive person introduces the guest in kind to the person on their right. Now everyone knows everyone else.

Do not bother getting too stuck on formality at a wedding over what order you stand in on line as the idea is that the guest will see everyone by the time they get to the end. It is painful enough, no reason to be any more tiresome with formality. And there is also no reason to have the entire wedding party stand in line too.

Think it over. No one will miss it if you forgo the line; you must get to every reception table regardless. The Hostess' two cents worth is that weddings should be fun: Bird seed and champagne cocktails. Save the line and hand off's for your next state reception.

Lovely invites

Sharing with you now a couple of the invites we received this season.



This pretty lazy daisy is so refreshing. I imagine a cheerful, bright, easy-to-adore wedding when holding this invitation. I absolutely want nothing more than to go and be among the unassuming but glorious daisies in North Carolina that weekend. I love invites that mix formality with ease and joy. My wedding invitations were so restrained; this one really made me think.



Same here. The undulating sand effect and starfish got me excited for a beach wedding again. this invite surely got guests up north dreaming of this Florida beach and the promise of a great party in the waning tropical sun.

Ah, how the Hostess loves a wedding.

Cherry blossom wedding

Photo: LA Times

Sharing with you now a very pretty wedding the Hostess attended in Washington D.C. on Cherry Blossom Weekend. The bride saw to a lovely marriage of her parents Korean culture and her minimalist American style and created a serene setting based on simplicity, cherry blossoms, and pussy willows. Nicely done with minimal waste and a light footprint on the environment. I took a lesson from it in these times.

Origami dinner napkins under votives served as centerpieces at cocktail hour. There could be a million colorful options for this. Great idea.

Colorful, healthy, attractive crudite.

The centerpieces could easily be a DIY, though these were not: Pussy willow in glass vase, river rocks, ribbon, water, votives, mirror.

Simple and pretty, not to mention a lighter impact on the earth than a huge forced flower arrangement.

From another angle. Still obsessing about how pretty they were in the light.

No clue what these cocktail nibbles were, evidently Asian inspired for the bride's family. Anyone?

Splurge on the tables was well selected: Jacquard table cloth in tonal browns. I wished there had been some color to play off this but there was not: Brown, coffee, and some cream in the river rocks in the centerpieces. The bridesmaids were also in brown.

Very pretty menus.

Wedding cakes make poor popsiciles

I do not know if you need my instruction on this point, but I assure you there are a few who do: When biting into a wedding cake, one should not encounter an enormous chunk of frozen strawberry between their teeth. The creators of the memorable wedding cake which prompts this thought intended it, possibly, to be a "strawberry shortcake" which entailed whipped cream and frozen berries rather than icing and filling.

The Hostess will be the first to side with those who do not enjoy eating fondant cakes which truly are better for admiring visually, picking apart, and nibbling than consuming. However, unstabilized whipping cream is not the answer for a bride on a budget, that would be cupcakes. Anyone who tells you they can stabilize whipping cream and berries in a four tier cake for many hours at room temperature is a bold face liar. The reason I bit into a frozen strawberry is that the berries were incorporated in their frozen state into the cake, the cake placed in the walk-in for as long as possible, and cut shortly into the reception to prevent a melting disaster.

The up-charge for many cake finishes can be weighty, nonetheless you are committed to them if you are having an outdoor, humid, or unreliable atmosphere in which the cake will be served. Here is where using a pastry chef rather than say, Costco or a friend from the chorale group, will pay off: They have been trained as to optimum conditions. Versus the former which does not care and only wants to sell you a cake or the latter which has a limited amount of knowledge and skills.

The cake at the top of the post does not have to be expensive, can mimic a shortcake inside, and depending on the icing does not require the cake be kept at 40 degrees until serving. The cake below would be a budget buster as is but is another reminder that there are a million options and you need to beat the pastry street until you find the one right for your event, climate, conditions, and tastes. If you decide to have a multi-tiered monster, then be prepared for some expense in purchasing the right cake. If you need less expensive options, there are so many, the Hostess needs ten more hands to name the alternatives.

Here are a few tips for choosing the person who will make your wedding cake:

1. Get recommendations from friends, facilities, caterers, and event planners as to what bakery and pastry chef has performed well for others with wedding cakes specifically.

2. Interview the chef, find out how much experience they have with weddings and your conditions. Review their portfolio as you would any designer or artist and find a style you like. Listen to their advice and decide if you trust it. Look them in the eye and decide if this is someone with whom you can work.

3. Two weeks before the wedding, schedule a tasting of your mini cake. Not a cupcake, not a slice. You will have to pay for this and it may be discouraged or cast aside, do not accept anything less. Put it in your budget and do not try to get away without. This is your only chance to be sure the cake tastes and appears the way you ordered it.

4. Look at the contract and be sure you have a means of recourse if the cake is not delivered, is damaged, or incorrect. If it is not typed on the document, you can write your agreement onto the order and then both you and the vendor will sign in agreement. Keep a copy. Stand your ground, reputable business people have nothing to be afraid of: Damaging their reputation is far more expensive to them than a dispute over one cake.

We all gotta go sometime

Right. You could and should wear it to your wedding.

But let's face it. We all gotta go sometime. Jennifer Behr custom makes obsceeeeenely gorgeous pieces like this. And as Aesthete's Lament mentioned in these distinguished pages: One should wear a veil. I'll have mine in black with a slightly smaller petal, after all I am sad, sad, sad and not totally psyched to have a reason to wear this veil.

Newport musings: Part 1

Researching a recent post on my pal Chandler in Newport, I took a moment to revisit some of my favorite things about Castle Hill and why, if I were hosting an event in Newport, Castle Hill Inn would be my first choice: As it also is for drinks on the hill, Sunday brunch, lunch and dinner; or for a place to celebrate the start of the moving and magnificent bi-annual Newport Bermuda Race as the regatta vessels arrive at the starting line at Castle Hill lighthouse (stay tuned for a Part 2 where I tell professional sporting spectators like myself everything you need to know on that topic), and for virtually every reason I can think of to be out of the house, frankly.

If you are visiting, even if you do not plan to stay at the Inn, I suggest making certain you get a chance to enjoy a cocktail or lunch on the hill. And if you are considering staying or marrying there, below is a bit of what you have to look forward to while enjoying the same views Jackie Kennedy did while spending summers at Hammersmith Farm, just a couple of steps away...

Now, admittedly, I am a Northeastern baby and I am partial to a tradtional nautical style and summery spots where you still need a sweater to protect you from the occasionally chilly ocean breezes. This is my Newport... every time I see these rooms and I imagine the summer breeze on hill through the windows it seems a room could not get any more perfect than these.