Back in October, WE tv contacted us about helping out an L.A. Times blogger with her wedding blog, Plan My Wedding. The short story is that the writer, the lovely Allison Kornberg, was letting her readers decide the details of her entire wedding! Well, except for the groom I guess! Or is there something you need to tell us Allison??
It was a great time and we totally clicked with Allison and her fiance. You know how it is cakers, making someone's cake is always more fun when you like the person! So, we all agreed that Merci Beaucoup should do her wedding cake and as such, give the final decision of her design over to the reader's!! Kind of scary....
The first step was to design a number of cakes based on Allison's color and theme and a couple directions from the bride to be. (On the left, you'll see the earliest sketch of one of the cakes that made it to the voting stage.) Not unlike most consultations really, and from that we came up with the three designs we would present on TV. Oh yeah, did I mention, part of the deal is the choices for each category of the Plan My Wedding Adventure are presented on the KTLA Morning News, a staple of morning television here in Los Angeles. We love KTLA! So we were pretty excited to head over to their studios and do a segment on the cakes last Wednesday.
(for all you Merci Beaucoup History buffs, Reva made a brief appearence on KTLA years ago as part of a remote on posh wedding ideas. You can see that video on You Tube here)
After Allison narrowed her choices down, we made three "dummy" cake versions of them for the show. Here's Reva doing a little pimp and prep behind the set. And yes, they are broadcasting live just on the other side of that wall, so the pics are all "no flash" and a little fuzzy at times.
But before that happend, we had to get up at 5 am! You never know what traffic will be like around here and we wanted to make sure we got there. After a quick Starbucks over at Gower Gulch, we drove into the lot where the guard gave us some green wristbands we never put on and a parking pass!
We drove in to stages 7 & 8 where KTLA broadcasts and met the producer, Leila, who guided us to the table where we'd set up the cakes. It was really odd since Elizabeth Taylor died that morning and we got to listen to them interview Larry King about it over the loudspeaker while we set everything up. Hollywood is so surreal sometimes, well, all the time! Then Mark Kriski walked by! Damn he's skinny, and for everyone outside of L.A., just ignore what I wrote;)
After we set up, we just kind of hung out for a while around the studio. I took the opportunity to snag some pix inclduing this first one which was my favorite!
You know how hard it was not to slip a suggestion in there about giving the old KTLA suggestion box a facelift? I think that sign was printed in the 80s!! Here's some more random shots from the day:
As Reva was getting her makeup done, I sat in the lobby right in front of that studio door up there watching a feed from the show where they were interviewing Gary Busey live. That's right, Gary Busey was in the house!! Much love for ya Gary, but you could practically smell the crazy on this guy. After his interview, he walked off through the weatherman's green screen as he was trying to do the weather, then he tripped and fell onto a poor producer, smearing his makeup on her white shirt! She got Busey'd!!
But that's not all that got Busey'd that morning! The big door swung open, and I could see him walking out, right towards our defenseless table of cakes. No Busey, don't!! He did. He swung his big paw up in the air and with his left pointer finger went straight down into the top of the cake. BUSEY!!! Thankfully, as it was a styrofoam cake, only a little indent of Busey DNA was left behind, but clearly, the cake had to be burned later. BUSEY!
"The Green Room"
We also had to contend with a room full of screaming babies for another segment on baby food until finally it was time for Reva and Allison to shine! Again, hard to take pics without the flash, but here they are getting ready:
You can see the video wall in the back. We sent over some photos for them to use, but they ended up only using one (the big one in the center) and they took the rest from Brides Magazine. But, if you look down on the bottom, second little cake from the left, one of our cakes from Brides made it onto the screens anyway!
After a couple little teasers, the girls were joined by KTLA anchor Michaela Pereira. I love Michaela! I actually use to watch her all the time on ZDTV and then Tech TV as the host of Internet Tonight. I even have an autograph from those days, so I was happy when she came to L.A. to do the morning show, and now Reva was up there with her talking cake!
The segment seemed really quick, and I totally blame Busey and the screaming babies! Actually, the segment with the babies was pretty hilarious. It was a chain reaction of crying and tossed bottles. Not unllike some of the more stressful days at the bakery! But it was a lot of fun, Michaela was very nice, Reva's new chef's coat looked great, and we snuck the crew some cake as we loaded the trusty Scion!
For those of you who missed it or are a little outside the KTLA broadcast area, click on over to Plan My Wedding to see the full video of the segment from March 23rd.
And don't forget to vote, vote, vote!!!! One vote per computer, so hijack a friend's and vote as much as you can for which cake you think Allison should have on her big day. VOTE!!!!!!!!
Of course, we'll keep you up to date on all the Plan My Wedding fun as it goes, including the winner of the cake vote, it's creation and delivery.
Be sure to "Like" Plan My Wedding on Facebook, and follow Allison on Twitter!!
And you know what? If you haven't "liked" us on Facebook yet either, what are you waiting for!!!
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