It takes a lot to get me to write a negative review for a business, and I don't do it unless I am really disappointed. We hired Pastries by Vreeke to do our wedding cake based on the positive Yelp reviews and the baker was recommended to us by our venue, Calamigos Ranch. My fiance and I were also really impressed by the portfolio photos on the bakery website as well as in the studio. Our wedding cake design was very simple in compassion to what Lori Vreeke has created for her other clients. The cake was designed by my fiance, a Graphic Designer, and it was meant to be one of the design highlights of our wedding. Lori asked us for a few things which we thought would ensure a perfect wedding cake. 1. A template of our cake design drawn to scale. 2. Some ribbon in the colors we wanted the fondant to be. Well, we provided a scale drawing of the pattern we wanted on our cake, and we provided the ribbon in the colors we wanted the cake to be. What we got was hideous. We were so shocked.
We wanted a purple cake. We got a brown cake, and it wasn't even a nice shade of brown. Lori told us that she could make the fondant any color we wanted which is why we sent her the ribbon. The cake did not match the ribbon. It wasn't even remotely close in color. The cake was also damaged. The fondant was bubbled in places and there were stains of blue icing here and there. I know that no cake is "perfect," but come on, this one was fugly. Lori also tried to say that the cake looked fine when she dropped it off and she sent us her pictures to prove it, but she conveniently didn't send us pictures of the most damaged side, and you can clearly see the damage in the pictures she did send us. She also tried to suggest that whatever damage we saw was not caused by her. Rather it was caused by the staff at Calamigos Ranch. Way to throw the venue that has been recommending your business to their clients, under the bus...
Overall, it looked like a rushed job. It also looked like Lori passed the work on to someone less talented than she claims to be. We feel like she didn't work on our cake, personally. You can judge for yourself, based on our pictures. This cake cost my mother over $1,750 and it was maybe worth half of it. The one positive thing I can say about this cake was that it tasted wonderful. Everyone raved about the filling. The ingredients were fresh and the quality was excellent, but a wedding cake should look as good as it tastes. So, I cannot recommend Pastries by Vreeke as a wedding cake vendor. I don't know why my cake came out the way it did. Maybe Lori was having an off day. Maybe she gave the cake to one of her less-talented employees. Maybe she had a more expensive, more interesting cake to work on that day. It doesn't really matter. read more