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Bulverde Bakery

14357 Blanco Rd. San Antonio, TX 78216 210-492-9595 www.bulverdebakery.com

It's not hard to find a beautiful wedding cake. The challenge is finding one that tastes good, and for more than a bite or two. If you're going to spend the money on a nice meal, why finish it with a dessert that will be abandoned after a few bites or cause your guests to go into sugar shock? As the dessert of the meal, your wedding cake should be more than beautiful. It should be delectable.

Bulverde Bakery has built its success on this philosophy. They care about the inside of their artful cakes as much as most brides care about the outside. Their main claim to fame is a delicious version of a tres leches (three milks) cake, a special sponge cake moist with cream, condensed milk, and evaporated milk. Bulverde Bakery is the only bakery in San Antonio that offers tres leches wedding cakes. One taste, and you'll be sold.

Frank and his wife, Martha, a first-class cake decorator, own and operate Bulverde Bakery and have been doing so for over eight years. Frank tells me that after years of accumulating popularity with local restaurants, stores, and other word-of-mouth customers, Bulverde Bakery somewhat stumbled into the full-fledged wedding-cake business about three years ago. That's when Frank suggested to Martha that they attend a local wedding expo the following weekend. "It was nuts," he says. "We must have served over 1,200 or 1,300 samples, and people just kept coming back for more."

But it wasn't nuts, really. Frank and Martha are simply attuned to what most people have been saying about wedding cakes for decades: they're too sweet, rich, and dry. "The sweetness of most cakes is too much for most people after a heavy meal," says Frank. "And why serve a cake to 200 or 300 people if they're just going to leave it on their plates?"

One local wedding consultant says she saw Bulverde Bakery's tres leches cake have an "astounding effect" at a recent wedding. "When I left the room, everyone was talking and moving around," she says. " When I returned, everyone was seated and the room was so silent. I asked someone what was wrong, and the answer was, 'Nothing! They're just enjoying the cake!'"

Frank usually tells couples to order enough cake to serve all their guests, even if they think some of the guests don't much care for sweets. "That's because the minute they taste our cake, everything changes," he says. "They eat it up---like you just did."

Guilty as charged. I'm sitting with Frank and Martha at the bakery's home in Cadillac Plaza, surrounded by gorgeous model cakes. The smell is heaven. Following a heavy lunch, I've just downed a piece of tres leches cake in two minutes flat, and I'm exactly the kind of person they've just described: one that dislikes the sugary, overbearing richness of most wedding cakes. But this cake---oh, this cake is cool, light, moist, and really good.

It's not just the tres leches batter that makes the cake so delicious. The light, whipped-cream frosting that Bulverde Bakery uses easily outdoes the standard buttercream any day. It's a great complement to the tres leches flavor. Even the cake-flowers and other decorations are made from it, though they appear as immaculate as the standard gum-paste embellishments used by most bakeries. I compliment Frank on the frosting, but he already knows. "People who don't generally eat cake will eat two pieces," he laughs.

He's not exaggerating. Sweet-toothless me, I gobble up a second piece of cake before leaving-this time a slice of groom's tres leches cake with chocolate-mousse frosting and Kahlua. Being partial to chocolate, I like this piece even better than the first one. As I tell him it's delicious, Frank knowingly smiles. "People think it's just the best thing since cat's whiskers," he says. It just might be.

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