Your North West Wedding- June/July 2020 (Issue 62)

Albert’s Restaurant fitted our theme perfectly, and when we visited and passed our idea to the staff, we knew they would be able to help us pull it off. We decided to have a black and white theme as it matched the colours of the room and didn’t raise suspicion with our guests. For the centrepieces, I decided to keep it simple. We asked Brown Rose Events to create two different styles; one was black cubes adorned with white artificial flowers, and the other was a trio of cylinder vases with sunken flowers and floating candles. The designs added height to the room and looked amazing. We wanted to get married on 27 th July, 2019 as that’s when our anniversary fell, but a family member was tying the knot on the 18 th , and we didn’t feel it would be appropriate to have our days so close together, so we decided to have a surprise wedding instead. We went to Salford Registry Office on the 27 th with close family and did a legal ceremony followed by a meal. We didn’t tell anyone about the wedding and invited everybody to our joint birthday party that November. Our guests didn’t have a clue that they were actually coming to our wedding. Our suppliers were amazing at keeping the secret for us. Once our guests had turned up, our DJ asked everyone to sit down to watch a slideshow. It included pictures of our life together and ended with a slide that said ‘we’d love for you to join us for our wedding day.’ Before this, I’d left the room to go change into my wedding dress and my sister had asked for the bridesmaids to leave the room and when they did they found gift bags asking them to be bridesmaids. I then walked into the room in my gown, and there were lots of tears and gasps as people realised what was happening. The food was provided by Albert’s Restaurant. We chose to have a hot buffet with a choice of chicken curry, Lancashire hotpot and a vegetable tagine. The food was amazing, and everyone loved it. Our cakes were from Lou Lou’s in Preston. We decided to have a birthday cake each and a two-tier creation. It had cascading meringues and macaroons, and after the ceremony, I added a cake-topper. The bakes were set out on a dressing table which we had purchased and upcycled to match the theme. The drawers were filled with chocolate brownies and flapjack pieces. 36