Bridal Bouquet

Our second wedding mini feature today is for Castle Couture in Marlboro or Englishtown New Jersey. The shop carries a wide selection of designer wedding gowns. They feature the work of Romona Keveza, Badgley Mischka and Paloma Blanka, just to name a few. Their website is one of the best that we have found online. It gives you a great idea of the quality of gowns that they carry. See for yourself here.

Castle carries wedding gowns, bridal gowns, bridesmaid dresses, wedding dresses, evening wear and accessories.

Wedding Cake

Sometimes we want to share our latest discoveries with you without doing a full feature length story about every single business. So today we are starting our Top 10 Weddings Discoveries with a fabulous baker and pastry artist in New York City, Kate Sullivan of Lovin Sullivan Cakes. Her designs show what a wonderful imagination she has. Her skill and attention to detail are profoundly evident in her work.

Our favorite cakes by Kate are her Modern Motherwell Wedding Cake, her blue and white Acara Wedding Cake, her incredibly elegant White Blossoms Wedding Cake and the intricate basket weave pattern Danish Moderne Wedding Cake.

See just how marvelous the work of Kate Sullivan is for yourself. Browse through her Wedding Cake Portfolio Here.

Wedding Photo: Bride in Wedding Dress

Razberry’s is a local business that I pass every time I make a trip down the road to Flemington. I finally found their website online and I wanted to do a short story on them. This modern wedding venue is located in the country on Route 12 in Baptistown, New Jersey, which is about half way between Flemington and Frenchtown.

Razberry’s has recently been remodeled and features a banquet hall that can accommodate up to 250 guests for a formal sit down banquet, an atrium and an outdoor patio with a fountain. Other notable features include: “a wooden dance floor, rich carpeting, mirrored accents are highlighted by three grand chandeliers, lighted column walls and French doors”.

You can visit Razberry’s online Here.

Note: There are several confusing things about Razberry’s, and the most important one is that their name is spelled with a z. It is Razberry’s not Raspberry’s or Raspberrys. Another things that is confusing about them is their actual address. Online it is listed as either 785 Route 12 in Flemington, or 834 Route 12 in Frenchtown. On their own website, neither of these addresses are used and they give you a post office box. (Post Office Box 167 in Baptistown).

If you are want directions to Razberrys-Raspberrys, these directions are from Google, and take you from Liberty Village in Flemington on Church Street to the conference center on Route 12:

1. Head south on Church St toward Stangl Rd 492 ft
2. Turn left at Stangl Rd 0.1 mi
3. Turn right at Parker Ave/RT-12
Continue to follow RT-12 0.4 mi
4. At the traffic circle, take the 2nd exit and stay on RT-12
Destination will be on the left

You can see a map of the trip here.

Quaint and Out of the Ordinary Locations for Weddings in our beautiful state of New Jersey.

Stockton NJ: Prallsville Mills Weddings

• Prallsville Mills, Stockton, Hunterdon County, NJ
• The Red Mill, Clinton, Hunterdon County, NJ
• The Hunterdon Museum of Art, Clinton, Hunterdon County, NJ
• The Chapel at Sandy Hook, Sandy Hook, Monmouth County, NJ
• Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, Essex County, NJ

Wedding Cake

When we were compiling our story on the best wedding websites, we ran across some wonderful bakers who make incredible wedding cakes and we wanted to spotlight them in their own feature article here on Frenchtowner.

Here are our featured bakers and wedding cake makers:

NJ Wedding Cakes: Wildflowers:

Wildflowers, owned and operated by Chef Lori Ann Blethen, is located in Bridgeton, New Jersey. Of all the cakes we have seen online these have to be some of the most extravagant and most refined. Chef Blethen’s confectionery flower creations have to be seen to be appreciated. Her minimum order is $500.00 and she delivers her works to Philadelphia, New Jersey, Delaware, New York City, Maryland and other areas. To see some of her marvelous fantasy wedding cake creations go here.

Philadelphia and Doylestown Wedding Cakes: The Night Bakery

We became acquainted with the Night Bakery years ago when we were in an antique mall in Chestnut Hill and the Night Baker was just across the street. This company makes incredibly delicious cakes and pastries that have been winning them awards for decades. Find out more about their cakes and desserts here.

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Flemington New Jersey Baker and Wedding Cake Maker: Baker’s Treat

We first learned about Baker’s Treat one day when we were in Lambertville doing a feature on The People’s Store. We stopped in to grab a coffee and a pastry and came to learn about the company donates ”100% of it’s profits to programs for women in early recovery from abuse”. Since then, the company has expanded and is now celebrating their grand opening in their new location on Route 12 across from Liberty Village. You can see some of their wedding cakes in a new photo gallery online here.

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Strange Unique Morris County Wedding Cakes: The Pink Box

The Pink Box is owned and operated by pastry artist Anne Heap. Anne’s shop is located in Denville, in Morris County. This is not your traditional bakery but the confectionery creations here are incredibly inventive. See Anne’s four tiered The Knot Party wedding cake here.

Check back in the next week as we add more to this list of talented bakers and confectionery artists in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Heart and Line Wedding/Love Illustration

The top two websites The Knot.com and The Wedding Channel are really the giants in this field with the most traffic and the most employees, but some of the smaller companies are exceptional sites. 

Frenchtowner.com’s ten best wedding websites are:

1. The Knot

10 points: #1 Alexa rank 3,446

 6 points: Google Page Rank = 6

 2 points: Frenchtowner.com design rank = 2 of 4 stars [cluttered design, sappy colors]

 2 points: Frenchtowner.com user friendliness rank = 3 of 4 stars [cluttered overload]

 4 points: Frenchtowner.com informational value rank 4 of 4 stars [info ranking]

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25 points

Frenchtowner.com Notes: The Knot is an incredibly large site [226,000 pages listed on Google] and a very successful one. A large part of that success is the wealth of local wedding resources that the site lists for every region of the country. For instance, just look at this page for photographers from the Hudson Valley Region.

Company Info: 260 Employees, [address: theknot.com], base New York City, NASDAQ: KNOT

2. (tie) Wedding Channel

9 points: #2 Alexa rank 5,528

6 points: Google Page Rank = 6

2 points: Frenchtowner.com design rank = 2 of 4 stars [cluttered design, sappy colors]

2 points: Frenchtowner.com user friendliness rank = 2 of 4 stars [cluttered, pop-ups]

4 points: Frenchtowner.com usefulness rank 4 of 4 stars [info ranking]

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23 points

Frenchtowner.com Notes: The wedding channel site is actually much larger in terms of pages than the knot.com. There are 486,000 wedding channel pages listed on Google, with a gigantic number of retailer and product pages as well as a large number of bridal registry pages.

Company Info: 100-250 Employees, [address: weddingchannel.com], base Los Angeles, private company.

2. (tie) Ewedding.com

8 points: #3 Alexa rank 26,588

5 points: Google Page Rank = 5

4 points: Frenchtowner.com design rank = 4 of 4 stars [clean, simple design, great colors]

4 points: Frenchtowner.com user friendliness rank = 4 of 4 stars [simple, no pop-ups]

2 points: Frenchtowner.com usefulness rank = 2 of 4 stars [service ranking]

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23 points

Frenchtowner.com Notes: Ewedding.com is a large site with 77,900 pages listed on Google.  Ewedding.com is a wedding services company that allows couples to make a website for their wedding, upload photos, events and calendars. Of all of our wedding and bridal sites that we reviewed it is the most advanced in terms of it’s technology and it is the best designed site of them all. It stands in a class above all the others. We would love to see what they could do if they decided to expand their offerings and services to compete with The Knot and The Wedding Channel.

Company info: # of employees: unknown, private company, [address: ewedding.com], no about us page or actual geographic contact information on the site.