PETOSKEY, MICH. — A four-tier vanilla buttercream cake sized to feed 200 guests was wheeled into the United Methodist fellowship hall on Howard Street Friday morning, where it now waits to be eaten by the 84 people who actually said they were coming.
The cake was ordered in March by Linda Voigt, mother of the bride, who instructed the baker at Crooked Tree Pastry to “round up, and then round up again.” Linda has been running weddings in this fashion for three daughters across eleven years and reports a perfect record of leftover cake.
“You can run out of folding chairs, you can run out of shrimp, you cannot run out of cake,” Linda said in the gravel lot, holding a clipboard with names crossed out in two different pens. “Nobody has ever once complained about extra cake. They complain about everything else.”
The bride, Hannah Voigt, 27, has confirmed 84 RSVPs against an invitation list of 137. The remaining 53 invitees have neither declined nor confirmed, a category Linda refers to flatly as “the cousins.”
Crooked Tree Pastry owner Margaret Bewley, who has baked 41 weddings in Emmet County since 2008, said the Voigt order sits on the larger end but is not unprecedented for the demographic. “I had a mother in 2017 order for 250 against a guest list of 90. We ate that cake at the church for three weeks. Funeral on Tuesday, baptism on Sunday, whatever they had. Just kept wheeling it back out.”
Officiant Pastor Doug Reinke, who has performed 14 weddings already this June and has 9 more on the books before the Fourth of July, said the math does not concern him. “The Voigts are a cake family. I’ve buried two of them with cake at the lunch afterwards. It tracks.”
Linda has additionally ordered 14 hotel-pan trays of mostaccioli for an estimated 22 mostaccioli-eaters, 3 cases of champagne for what she described as “a non-drinking side,” 240 chicken breasts pre-cut into halves on the suspicion that 120 chicken breasts is somehow not enough, and a backup sheet cake held in the church kitchen “in case the main cake goes.”
The main cake, by all visible accounts, is not going anywhere.
A contingency plan is already in place. Linda has pre-arranged for surplus cake to be transported in clamshell containers to the parish hall at Holy Childhood, the lobby of Bay Bluffs nursing home, and the Friday potluck at the Elks, in that order. Slices not deployed by Sunday afternoon will be frozen in two-piece sleeves and surfaced at family gatherings through approximately Labor Day, at which point Linda has indicated the remainder will be “someone else’s problem.”
Asked whether any of this troubled her, the bride paused at the door of the fellowship hall, looked at the cake, and said it did not. “My mom’s been right every single time,” Hannah said. “There’s always cake left over and there’s always somebody crying in the parking lot. You just plan for both.”
The wedding is scheduled for 4 p.m. Saturday. As of Friday evening, the cousins had not weighed in.