MR & MRS : eat, drink & dance
I’m not sure how this post will seamlessly flow from food and drink into music but they seem like a good trio to group together and waffle about... so let’s see how it goes! Hopefully you’ll enjoy finding out a bit more about the tasty treats, delicious tipples and toe tappers we chose for our Big Day!
THE FOOD
One of the first things we decided on (literally on Christmas day when we got engaged) was what kind of food we would have at our wedding. If you’re a regular around these Sunshiney parts and know anything about me, you’ll know how much I love my food, you might also remember that I became slightly obsessed with all the food vans in Cambridge when I moved here (see #fattybumbumdrawsvans for evidence).
I was VERY excited to be asked to use my #fattybumbumdrawsvans images to make a poster for the @foodpark_cam night market last Summer 🙌🏻
So it probably won’t come as a surprise that we picked not one or two, but FOUR of our favourite Cambridge street food ‘vans’, I use the term van loosely as technically one was a tricycle but you get the picture - WE WANTED ALL THE FOOD! We also pulled together a big table of SNACKS (crisps, party food, bread, chutneys etc) and CAKE so people could help themselves to nibbles if they wanted to and that magical table also meant we had somewhere to pop the Wedding 'cake' and other cakes we had planned.
With us having food vans, we didn’t have a set menu, seating plan or proper sit down meal in mind. It was basically a ‘smash and grab’ affair - an orderly, friendly one that is! So after speeches and 'cake' cutting, guests were told the vans were open and everyone helped themselves to what they fancied and then sat wherever they liked!
Because f*ck seating plans!
WANDERING YAK
There aren’t enough words in the world to describe just how much we LOVE Wandering Yak. Not only the food but also Ian and Helen who create the incredible delights, they are two of the nicest, smiley, friendliest folks in the world and I genuinely love them to pieces.
Helen and Ian, the lovely human beans who run Wandering Yak 👌🏻
Image credit : wanderingyak.co.uk
The colours, the flavours, the textures, EVERYTHING about their dishes is amazing and they pulled together the most delicious menu for us with mini mezzes and sweet potato fries. YUM! Perfect for all of our veggie and vegan guests too!
BUFFALO JOES
It took me a few months after moving to Cambridge to actually get to see Joey at one of the foodParks but I’ll never forget the first time I tried those Chicken burgers - I nearly fell off my chair and when I dragged Will along to the night market a week or so after, well, I’d never seen anyone eat buffalo wings so fast! It was a no-brainer.
Buffalo Joe's chicken in a van, in all his glory! 📷 Daniel Ackerley Photography
Not only is Joey’s chicken legendary around these parts, Joey himself is a total legend and one of the nicest guys. The mini sliders and buffalo wing combos he created especially for us went down a storm and I’m so happy he saved us some before everyone else cleaned him out!
Mini sliders prep 🐔
JACK’S GELATO
Another legend in Cambridge, is Jack and his incredible Gelato. Will and I pop in to Jack’s shop on Bene’t Street pretty much every time we’re in town together, no matter the weather! In winter his hot chocolate is divine and in summer you could go in every day and still never work your way through all the amazing, inventive flavours - SO GOOD! We kept this a little surprise for people on the day and everyone stormed the trike after the ceremony to get a scoop. Sadly we missed out on the day but have more than made up for it since, by popping in to the shop for our regular fix.
Blushed a little bit hard when I saw our wedding thank you card up in Jack's Gelato on Bene't Street 🙊
CHURROS BAR
Charlotte and Co are just as sweet and lovely as the churros and tasty sauces they make! Another surprise treat for guests, The Churros Bar turned up to provide a cure for any munchies later in the evening and they also made me happy cry on the dance floor when they presented a ‘J & W’ made from Churros to us!
Totally didn't cry when @churros_bar presented this to us on the dance floor! 😍
THE WEDDING CAKE
We like cheese. OK, we LOVE cheese. So when it came to picking a wedding cake, there really was NO question about what we would go for. A cake made of cheese was the only choice and Cambridge Cheese Company was the place to make our cheese dreams come true.
The shop of dreams! @cambridgecheeseco 🧀
It was such a chore tasting and deciding on which cheese to go for but someone had to do it and we both threw ourselves into it *ahem* After some email conversations and popping in a few times to chat with Jade and sample various cheeses we picked the stars of our tower and MY GOD was it beautiful!
Cutting the cheese and giggling like school kids - 100% happiness! 😃
April made it look STUNNING with the grapes and figs we bought to decorate it and my wonderful friend, Georgina (@sewinthegarden) embraced my crazy idea of creating mini Bride & Groom outfits for the Sylvanian Families Toby & Pegs I had bought. THEY LOOKED SO FRIGGIN’ CUTE!
SWEET STUFF
Knowing not everyone enjoys cheese as much as we do, and also knowing we had vegan and some lactose intolerant guests turning up we also had a proper cake plan. A bloody good one as it turned out too thanks to lovely, local Two Little Cats Bakery and 4 of our amazingly talented guests, who agreed to bring cakes for us as part of our Patchworkit gift list.
Look how beautiful our @twolittlecatsbakery cake is! 😍
April took the random fake grass, mini parrot decorations and plastic flowers I had bought on a whim and made the table of dreams for this show-stopping, funfetti cake. I was so excited when I saw it on the day, but don’t just take my word for it… apparently I was caught on camera!
Pure joy! 📷 Daniel Ackerley Photography
One of my besties, Sarah, also made this incredible cake with a mini Jo and Will with our dream Campervan on it - I mean, LOOK HOW CUTE! I didn’t really want anyone to eat it because it looked so damn good but it went down a treat and I got to keep the mini marzipan figures of us so I was a very happy bean.
I didn't want anyone to eat this one, look at the perfect mini-us and Toby & Pegs! 😍
A HUGE thank you to Zoë, Sarah and Claire who also brought cakes that vanished in a blink - so fast that I didn’t actually get to see them properly *sob* I hear there were squeals of delight as the rainbow cake was cut into though!
THE DRINK
The Gin Joint
I mentioned lovely Carly and Ginny, the horse box bar in my first post and boy, did they go down a treat! With a choice of welcome and toast drinks (fizz, beer, G&T, soft drinks) and a full menu of DELICIOUS gin based cocktails, they had everyone smiling!
Carly and Ginny, the horsebox 🍸
Image credit : theginjointcouk.wordpress.com
One of my favourite moments was The Beard and I being handed a balloon glass full of G&T after the ceremony, closely followed by one of my besties husband coming up to me several times throughout the night telling me how much he loved gin after a lifetime of refusing to drink it because it looked too ‘sissy’. The Gin Joint team made so many gin lovers (existing and newly converted!) happy and catered for the non-gin lovers perfectly too!
Newly-wed with G&Ts in hand! Thanks to @kookevents for the happy snap 💛
THE BEER
We are lucky enough to have a very talented, very generous Hairy Brewer in our lives! Adam gifted us two kegs of home-brew, one especially for me and one for Will. They were both AMAZING and everyone we spoke to loved them!
The Hairy Brewer himself, as captured by his beautiful wife, @detdets 🍻
Not only did Adam brew delicious nectars for us, he also commissioned one of our talented creative friends to design labels and poems for the kegs too! HOW AMAZING are these by @artyfartymo?!?!
Completely in LOVE with these custom labels by @artyfartymo 🙌🏻
TEA BAR
Everyone who knows me, will know I’m a BIG tea drinker and when we went to see Horningsea Pavilion for the first time and I saw the kitchen hatch my eyes lit up - I knew we had to use it to serve Tea and Coffee from on our big day.
I had been chatting to lovely Laura who works for the team at The Brew Tea Company, she had sent me some of their tea as a gift last Christmas and I fell in love. Not only are the blends delicious (English Breakfast or Chai please!) but their packaging is so cute and colourful!
Toby Cat helping us pick which @brewteaco blends to go for! ☕️
Lovely Pauline at Horningsea Pavilion had agreed to let us use their urn and crockery and April had some fabulous Kilner drinks dispensers so we could set up a lovely space to provide hot beverages and soft drinks for guests.
We decorated the tea bar area with some colourful garlands and some large laser cut letters (thank you Paul , @eagelabscherry!) that I had painted, they spelled out the word TEA if you couldn't guess. The fun colours of the individually wrapped tea bags and cute coloured baskets we popped them in made the area look so bright and inviting.
Really enjoyed painting these laser cut letters and playing with all the colourful teas!
THE CHOONES
Eat, drink and be merry was the idea! I think we nailed the eating and drinking part with some of our favourite foodie treats and beverages and as I mentioned in the first post, I think the MP3s 100% SMASHED the being merry part by playing some brilliant music and getting all of our guests dancing during their sets!
As well as the band playing two, one hour sets during the evening, The Beard and I had been building playlists since NYE 2016 and had built up quite the selection of random choones on Spotify. Our wonderful celebrant, Michelle (who I also spoke about in my first post) had asked us to think about key music to use for the ceremony - walking in, walking out, signing papers etc and of course there was the dreaded FIRST DANCE to consider.
Although we didn’t have much trouble picking our favourite, significant songs, it was quite tough deciding what to use and when but I’m still SO HAPPY with everything we decided on so thought it might be nice to end this blog post with a list of lovely (and some ridiculous) songs from our day.
WALKING IN
‘You are my Sunshine’ is a very important, very special, significant song with a lot of meaning to me and my family and Frank Turner’s cover is so beautifully done. It was the perfect song to walk in to and it’s a good job I was too distracted by all the gorgeous faces of our guests as I was walking in to listen to it as it may have broken me!
CEREMONY
During the ceremony Will and I lit a candle in memory of loved ones and also lit our own candles to 'signify our union'. We also needed time to sign papers so we chose to have some of our favourite songs playing in the background during these parts too, namely TEA by Brendan Benson and Shadow Boxing by Newton Faulkner.
"Let's not set fire to the tip, yeah?"
WALKING OUT
Something we hadn’t considered until Michelle mentioned it and as perfect as Jay-Z’s ’99 Problems’ would have been, we decided on another of our favourite sing out loud (shout-along) songs and walked out of the ceremony to Mountains by Biffy Clyro.
FIRST DANCE
You may have already clocked this is the first post of this series but we decided, quite early on that we would have a Flight of the Conchords song as our first dance - even though 99 Problems (again) was a strong contender!
After batting about a lot of hilarious suggestions from Boom King and Most Beautiful Girl to Angels and Business Time, we decided that The Sellotape song was PERFECT! It was something we could both shuffle awkwardly and giggle to and something that would also mean a lot to us. It wasn’t nearly as painful as I had imagined (I was terrified of dancing in front of everyone!) and the MP3s performed it perfectly! They even presented us with our very own roll of ‘the sticky stuff’ at the end of the song! We were beside ourselves!
"Love is like a roll a tape, it's real good for making two things one" - Flight of the Conchords
END OF THE NIGHT
Now, maybe the gin, sunshine and excitement of the day has scrambled my brain a bit but I have a quite vivid memory of spending the last two songs of the night on the dance floor with my Duckypoos, Laura. We were dancing hard to two of our favourite songs (and two of the first songs to make it on to the wedding playlist to start with), Dick in a Box by Lonely Island and Too Many Dicks, another corker by Flight of the Conchords. I don’t know about everyone else but THAT was a perfect way to end a day full of celebrations with all of our favourite human beans!
Another strong contender for our first dance 🙊
THE REST
As I mentioned earlier, we had set up a few playlists, Will had pulled together one to play inside the pavilion throughout the day, which was a bit more chilled out, we had one for inside the tipi as guests arrived and I had pulled together a mash up of disney, cheesy pop, metal and rock for when we were getting ready in the morning. We had A LOT of music and have since pulled it all into one big playlist on Spotify, which you can also listen to - if you’d like to of course! Our combined music taste is eclectic, to say the least but if you’re open to anything and everything, I think you’re in for a treat!
Our mash up of wedding playlists all in one place : Mr & Mrs Sunshine on Spotify
Hopefully you’ve enjoyed the waffle again this week, it made me quite hungry writing it so I hope you have some snacks to hand! As with the last two posts, I’ve popped links below to all the wonderful beans we worked with and are mentioned in this post. Go show them some love and if you’re in Cambridge any time soon, make sure you hunt down the vans!
WANDERING YAK
mezzes & fries | wanderingyak.co.uk | @wanderingyak
BUFFALO JOES
chicken wings & mini sliders | @buffalojoescamb
JACK’S GELATO
gelato trike | jacksgelato.com | @gelatojack
CHURROS BAR
churros and dips | churrosbar.co.uk | @churros_bar
FOODPARK
pop up food events | foodparkcam.com | @foodpark_cam
KOOK EVENTS
cordinator | kookevents.co.uk | @kookevents
DANIEL ACKERLEY
photography | peterboroughweddingphotography.co.uk | @danielackerley
CAMBRIDGE CHEESE COMPANY
cheese | cambridgecheese.com | @cambridgecheeseco
SEW IN THE GARDEN
cake topper outfits | etsy.com/SewInTheGarden | @sewinthegarden
TWO LITTLE CATS BAKERY
GF and Vegan cake | twolittlecats.co.uk | @twolittlecatsbakery
THE GIN JOINT
horse box bar | ginjoint.co.uk | @theginjointuk
ARTY FARTY MO
beers artwork | etsy.com/artyfartymoshop | @artyfartymo
BREW TEA COMPANY
tea | brewteacompany.co.uk | @brewteaco
MP3s
band | themp3sband.co.uk | warble-entertainment.com/the-mp3s
MICHELLE TAYLOR
celebrant | mtaylorcelebrant.co.uk | @michelle_funkycelebrant
NEXT UP: pimping the place
From colour schemes (or lack of) to random flamingoes, paper lanterns, pompoms and OS maps! Next week's post will be an introduction to what we planned to do with our lovely venue in terms of decor.