The Garden City Telegram

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Master planners

Published 7/18/2009 in Features

With her brown hair tucked inside her black bonnet, cake decorator Helena Banman kneels next to the seven-tier wedding cake towering above her head as she pipes small beads of butter creme frosting around its edges.

From inside the basement kitchen of her Garden City home, the mother of three, who's been baking and decorating for more than seven years, decided to turn her personal hobby into a business — Designer Cakes — creating delectable delicacies for a growing list of clients that stretches across southwest Kansas.

The seven fruit-filled chocolate and vanilla layers Banman's currently working on are for her sister, Tina, who is getting married in a few days.

Most of her clients — brides-to-be — are Banman's favorite customers because making wedding cakes offers her the opportunity to be as creative as she'd like with floral and detail-heavy designs.

"A lot of brides walk in here and they just don't know what they want. I ask them a long series of questions about what they like, and together we figure it out," she said, adding that she goes through several hours of sketches before she and the couple settle on a perfect design.

An array of digital photographs of wedding cakes decorated with satin and fondant ribbons and crimson-red floral cascades line the soft-green walls of the consultation room inside the first-floor room of her home. Already, Banman said, she has seven wedding cakes booked for next year and more consultations with couples on the way.

Come wedding day, however, it's not the bride or groom's reaction she's worried about.

"It's the bride's mom," Banman said. "In my head I'm thinking, 'Is she going to like it?'"

Planning the perfect day

Bride-to-be Tirra Elder can't remember exactly how her wedding cake is going to look, but there's someone else ready with the answer.

"It'll have four tiers," interjects Christopher Cruz, a Garden City cosmetologist by day and wedding planner by night. "It's going to be an ivory cake with black satin ribbon trim — very elegant."

Elder admits she's a perfectionist and searched out an area wedding planner to professionally coordinate her candle-lit winter wedding at the First United Methodist Church in November, pulling in her mother, mother-in-law, and fiance Jordan Carter, 24, for cake, dress and decoration details.

"I knew there were a lot of things to do before we started," said Elder, originally from Leoti and a 2007 graduate of Fort Hays State University. "But the hardest thing to put together has been the wording and ordering of things, like the music and guest lists. We're still even working on the program."

Carter, the groom-to-be originally from Scott City, is mum on the details and sheepishly replies that he's mostly just along for the ride.

"I'm not doing a whole lot. She'll ask for my opinion, but I'm not picky — whatever she wants," he said.

Cruz, a cosmetologist at Vogue who earned his higher education in fashion design, said he's been planning weddings in this corner of the state for more than 10 years and handles two to six per year. His current male client, he said, represents the typical husbands-to-be.

"Most grooms only know what to wear, where to be and what they have to do," the wedding planner said and laughed.

Cruz, who described the Elder-Carter wedding as "an elegant affair with a noble simplicity," said some couples think they can do without a wedding planner to save extra dollars.

But in the end, he said, it saves members of the wedding party — especially the brides — from having to worry about the stresses and responsibilities that interfere with them having their perfect day.

"I'm the one in the kitchen making sure everything is in order, sending the bride down the aisle at the right time, making sure things and people are where they need to be," Cruz said, explaining that he's redecorated melting butter creme cakes, repaired busted zippers on bridesmaids dresses and even redesigned the bust of a wedding dress using safety pins when it came back with the wrong measurements.

"I always tell my brides, 'something won't go as planned, but don't worry about it — no one else will know any different,'" he said. "Sometimes I feel like Jennifer Lopez from that movie, 'The Wedding Planner,' ready with my toolbox of supplies," he added, laughing.

What's In, What's Out

Every bride is different, said Cruz, and so every wedding is also different.

"Every bride wants to be individual, and (the wedding) is based around her styles and preferences," he said. "What is amazing is that the color schemes always change from season to season. This fall, all the brides are doing red, while last year it was green and blue."

Destination weddings are in, too, said Cruz, who advised what he described as a "princess wedding" in Colorado Springs, Colo., for a bride who moved her entire guest list to the vacation spot, got married to her groom in a cathedral and waved to her guests outside from atop the cathedral balcony.

"Basically in a destination wedding, you go somewhere else and get married," he said. "It's great for everybody because it gives the guests a chance to get away from home, too."

In the wedding cake world, Banman's also seen a few interesting trends.

"People are losing interest in couple toppers. Now it's all about monograms," she said, adding that she keeps up with trends for her home-based business via the World Wide Web.

Also making a fashionable comeback is the groom's cake, a smaller cake that is often a reflection of the personality of the groom and which couples freeze to be eaten at a later date, such as an anniversary.

According to tradition, a groom's cake was sliced and boxed for unmarried girls attending a wedding, who would take the pieces home and place them under their pillows, hopeful that the men they dreamed of would become their future husbands.

A Do-It-Yourself Wedding

Garden City native Sarah Bradstreet still has nearly an entire year to plan her June 2010 wedding, but the self-professed "bride-zilla" already has her wedding hall, reception hall, cake and photographers booked.

The guest list keeps growing and the costs keep multiplying, but the recent Kansas State University graduate isn't planning on getting a wedding planner — that's what her mom, Jeanne, is for.

"I'm fairly crafty, being an elementary school teacher and all, and my mom and I are both pretty creative. And this is so much fun for both of us," the bride-to-be said. "If you're not close with your mom, I don't know how you'd get a wedding planned!"

Her mother, Jeanne Bradstreet, agreed.

"This is our first daughter to get married, and we're just so excited," she said, adding that with both mother and daughter in the same town, the planning process is eased. "Of course, being our first daughter, we also don't know what to expect or what our budget will be. My husband, Sarah's father, said, 'How about I give you guys ten grand and let you two elope — it'll probably be a bargain for me!'"

In the back pocket of a three-ring binder quickly filling with timelines, cake designs and wedding dress ads ripped from magazines, Bradstreet slips in the receipts and contracts they've collected over the last few months.

"This way we can track our expenses, whether we spend 93 cents or $1,000," she said.

The mother and daughter who recently came back from a bridal show in Wichita said they're busy designing center pieces for the reception and plan to have an open "candy" bar for their guests, a fairly new trend where guests freely pocket small pieces of chocolate as party favors from an open bar.

To save money on invitations, the bride-to-be and her fiance, Chris Shrimplin, 23, also a Garden City native and architecture graduate who attended K-State along with his fiancee, created and designed their own invitations — tri-fold cyan and black cards detailing the plans of their June 12, 2010, wedding.

The mother and daughter are pulling family members in to help glue nearly 300 invitations.

"Know anyone who wants to join our gluing party?" they both asked and laughed.

Though knee-deep into her wedding plans, the 22-year-old Bradstreet said the process still feels surreal, and perhaps only a white dress will change that.

"When I put on that dress — whether it looks ugly or pretty — that's when I think it's really going to hit me," she said. "I'm getting married!"

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