Real Life Bride: Week 20

What a productive day we had last week! As I mentioned Ryan's mom was in town, so we all headed up to LA and out to the Westlake area. Our first visit was to Westlake Village Inn, one of the hotels that we have a room block at. They have a restaurant called Mediterraneo, which was nice, but the real gem is a private room called the Wine Cellar. It's a stone enclosed structure that opens up to the pond on the hotel grounds. It beautiful, secluded and quaint - perfect for our rehearsal dinner! We also stopped at a few restaurants located on the lake (Boccacio's and Zin's), but we all knew the Wine Cellar was the spot for us, and fortunately it was available on our date!

Our next task was our cake tasting. I don't care that much for cake, and Ryan just loves chocolate, so we thought a simple, home-made style cake would be perfect for us and we found just that at Susiecakes in Calabasas. We tasted three different cake flavors and mutiple filling flavors, but selected exactly what we probably would have even without tasting. Also, since Susiecakes doesn't specialize in elaborate wedding cake design, their pricing is extremely reasonable!

After the cake tasting, we drove back out to Saddlerock Ranch to show Ryan's mom the venue. It was a beautiful day, so calm and peaceful in the hills of Malibu/Westlake. I think it's going to be really lovely for our wedding day.

Finally, we made the trek back across LA to the downtown area for our tasting with The Food Matters. At this point we were all pretty exhausted (how Beth does this on a regular basis, I do not know!), but the tasting was well worth the long day. The presentation was perfect and the flavors were all amazing. Ryan was crazy about the salad while I loved an impromptu corn pasta dish (I'm pushing to have that added onto the menu!). We are hoping to try a couple different dishes to get the main entrees just right (we tried a New York strip that Ryan loved, but I prefer filet), but overall it was great and I know no one will leave our wedding hungry! My personal favorite had to have been all the desserts - Jerry definitely spoiled us with delicious treats and we were all happily stuffed as we left!

{On our way out through the service elevator!}