A Pastel Drag Brunch Wedding in Austin, With Eight Cakes the Bride Made Herself

The brief Jordan and Charlie gave their planner was that guests should walk away feeling like the whole day had been “an absolute fever dream, like Jackie O. took a few hits of acid and then planned a garden party.” Alex of XO Moreau took that as a spec. The party started at 11 am under the wisteria at Woodbine Mansion in Austin, a drag queen officiated, a mimosa cart worked the tables, lion dancers brought the couple into the reception, and eight cakes Jordan made herself stood stacked on a giant cake-shaped display at the end of the dance floor.

Jordan is a cake decorator, Charlie is a tech consultant, and the whole day is a love letter to where they both come from. Charlie is originally from China and Jordan is a Florida transplant. The wedding logo was the double happiness symbol, a fixture at traditional Chinese weddings, with a Manchurian crane beside it, because cranes mate for life and the Mandarin word for crane sounds like the word for harmony. Florida got its due through what Jordan calls “the time honored Floridian tradition of day drinking under the guise of having brunch.” Ruét Photo shot the day, Blumen Floral built the pastel garden around it, and Hannah Zahner did Jordan’s hair and makeup.

The First Look

How Jordan and Charlie Met

The short answer is Tinder. The long answer is that Jordan was putting off a cake order and downloaded the app to procrastinate, having gotten bored of the men on, in her words, “other more upstanding dating apps.” Twenty minutes in, Charlie was the first person she swiped right on, and it matched, even though her profile said nothing beyond Gemini and cake decorator. They talked into the night and somewhere in there started showing each other the art in their houses. They had the same piece by Austin artist Tsz Kam hanging on their walls. Jordan had no real plan to meet a stranger from the internet, but she took that as a sign, and they met for a drink at The Aristocrat, her favorite dive bar. About 20 minutes into the date, while Charlie stepped away for a moment, she texted a friend: “I think I just met my husband.”

Once they were engaged, they commissioned Tsz Kam to paint the two of them in the style of the piece that started it. All three paintings hung at the wedding, and the portrait made one last appearance at the exit, printed on a set of surprise bolo ties.

and a moment for Jordan’s Swan Nails!!!

Charlie’s Velvet Jacket and the Two Birds on His Lapel

Charlie wanted something more special than a regular suit and less stuffy than a traditional tuxedo, and the answer was a navy velvet dinner jacket over tuxedo trousers from Suit Supply, finished with navy velvet loafers. The lapel is where the wedding logo moved onto a body: two vintage crystal brooches, a Manchurian crane and a flamingo, “to represent me and Jordan.” His bird, her bird, pinned so they face each other. Grooms wearing brooches is one of the trends we’re loving most right now, and this pair makes the case.

The groomsmen wore steel blue, a shade lighter than Charlie’s navy, so he reads as the groom without anyone standing in a different shape. Each lapel got its own piece. One carried a tight cluster of golden yellow blooms, another a brooch of lavender crystals strung to drip like the wisteria over the altar.

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Double Happiness, Painted Pink

The ceremony set is the wedding logo built at the scale of a room. Two pink hearts stand in front of the porch, each carrying the double happiness character in pale blue, and the urns on either side are painted in the same hand, so the whole altar reads as one made object rather than a backdrop with flowers parked in front of it. Blumen Floral filled those urns with blue hydrangea, yellow garden roses, peach roses, and trailing orchids, then laid the same mix directly on the ground along the grass aisle instead of lifting it onto stands. At a daytime ceremony, with guests seated low in yellow wire chairs, that keeps every sightline open to the hearts. Overhead, the venue’s wisteria acted as a canopy, so nothing had to be built up there.

What makes it work is that both sides of their story live in the same frame. The pastels and garden roses say Jackie O. garden party. The double happiness character and the crane say Chinese wedding. Neither one plays backup to the other. If your family has a symbol everyone would recognize on sight, give it the altar, not a line in the program.

The Ceremony

The officiant was a queen from Extragrams, the Austin company that manages much of the local drag scene and worked with Alex to fit as many performers into one afternoon as the schedule could hold. Her walk down the aisle in lavender satin was the first performance of the day, and she ran what the couple call “an emotional wedding ceremony.” Charlie went down first, to Jordan’s brother on acoustic guitar with the groomsmen singing backup. Then Jordan came in with her mother, to a song she and her late father loved to listen to together.

Three Dresses and a Ring Two Families Made

Jordan planned three outfit changes. “I figured if ever there were a time for me to be over the top, it’d be at my wedding surrounded by drag queens.” The ceremony dress is Enzoani, found at Blush Bridal in Austin: an off-the-shoulder Brigitte Bardot neckline over a fitted column, the vintage flare she wanted without tipping a daytime wedding into evening. For the first dance she switched into a 1950s vintage dress with an attached scarf, chosen for a spin-heavy swing dance, and for the exit she went to Olivia Bottega for a tea-length dress with the nipped waist and full skirt of Dior’s 1947 New Look, minus the vintage Dior price tag.

Every piece of jewelry she wore came from someone who loved her first. Her grandmother’s pearls. A sapphire and diamond bracelet that was the first gift her late father gave her mother. Diamond butterfly earrings from her mother. And an opal ring, which Jordan tells better than anyone else could:

“The opal ring was designed by my grandmother on my father’s side and featured an opal my father brought back with him from Australia. He originally gave it to my aunt, saying that he didn’t think he’d ever have a wife or daughter to give it to. My aunt told him she knew he would, so she’d hold on to it until his future daughter turned 18. I had no idea about any of this until my aunt presented me with the gift years after my father had already passed away. It was unfortunately too small, so my mother had it resized and sacrificed the gold from her wedding band to do it.”

Cocktail Hour, and a Museum of the Relationship

Cocktail hour ran inside the mansion, where a queen pushed a dim sum cart from Contigo Catering through the rooms. The crane went onto the paper here: escort cards illustrated with herons and sandhill cranes, propped along the mantel under the gilded mirror, and a die-cut crane card that tells the Tinder story to anyone who stops long enough to read it. The three Tsz Kam paintings hung in the same rooms, each with a little card explaining why.

Brunch, With Queens

Brunch is the Florida half of the day, and brunch at a wedding means guests are partying by 11 am, so the entertainment had to hold an entire afternoon. Jordan and Charlie have always loved RuPaul’s Drag Race and the local scene in Austin, which settled it: if there was going to be a brunch, it was going to be a drag brunch. A mimosa cart went table to table. Contigo served southern-style grits as a course. And Extragrams kept queens coming through the house and across the lawn all afternoon, each one dressed to a different idea.

The Tables

The centerpieces were oranges, stacked into sculptures. Oranges are an auspicious wedding gift in China, for wealth and luck, and they are also Florida, which makes them the one object on the table that belongs to both families at once. The rest of the setting follows that overlap: navy fan chargers, gold-tipped chopsticks laid beside the forks, heron-illustrated table numbers, menus with a cloud border, and a cherry die-cut tied in pink ribbon, so the cake is on the table before anyone has seen it. A garland of small cream blossoms hangs from a lilac parasol over each centerpiece, which turns a round table into its own small tent at an outdoor brunch.

The Giant Cake

Jordan describes herself as “a cake decorator and a person who loves to make more work for myself,” and that is how one wedding cake became eight cakes on a cake-shaped structure a friend built, which she stayed up decorating for days. Friends and family had flown in from all over the country and most of them had never tasted her work, since cake does not do well in the mail, so the menu was built from cakes with a story: the first cake she ever had as a baby, the cake she made Charlie when they first started dating, the favorites of the most important people in their lives. Her own Buttercream Babe is the baker of record.

The cherries on top are the only saturated red in a pastel day, and that is why your eye finds the cake from anywhere on the lawn. It stands at the end of the white dance floor like a stage set because it was one; the queens performed in front of it all afternoon. There is something to take from this even without a piping bag: one oversized object at the end of the room does more than six medium ones scattered through it.

The gazebo on the lawn was wrapped floor to ceiling in sheer pink by Unique Designs & Events and furnished as a lounge, with a blush velvet sofa and leather poufs on the brick. The bar got the crane one more time, in a peony-and-crane print wrapped around its front with ruffle trim, a small red dragon decal, and citrus stacked on top.

The Grand Entrance

Jordan and Charlie came into the reception behind local lion dancers from TDDT, who dance at Chinese weddings to bless the couple and ward off evil with drums and gongs. It was not the only tradition they kept. In the days before the wedding they hosted a tea ceremony at their house, in a traditional qipao and tang suit, honoring their families living and dead for the sacrifices it took to raise them.

The Performances

The performances ran right through brunch, with Infinity Sound Lab on the music. Between sets, a duo of country queens taught the whole room a dance to Beyoncé’s “TEXAS HOLD ‘EM,” and there is no better song to teach a room in Austin. Jordan and Charlie’s own first dance was a spin-heavy swing number, her in the 1950s dress with the scarf and him in a polo that matched it, with vintage high-waisted trousers to keep the era honest.

Then the cake cutting, with help. Extragrams sent a queen dressed as a tiered wedding cake to assist, so the giant cake was cut by a bride who decorates cakes for a living, standing beside a queen who was one.

The giant cake had one more scene in it, and so did the aisle. Both in their own words:

The Exit

The exit look is the Olivia Bottega tea-length, and Jordan styled it for a Texas afternoon rather than a Paris salon: white heart-shaped sunglasses, blue kitten heels, and a loose pastel bouquet. Charlie changed into a brown double-breasted suit from Suit Supply, and his best man surprised everyone with custom bolo ties printed with Charlie’s face from the Tsz Kam wedding portrait. They left in a pale blue convertible from Comal Classics, the right car for a dress cut like 1947.

Their last word is the one to keep: “When you’re planning your wedding and everyone in your life is chiming in about what is proper or traditional, politely listen and then ignore all of the advice they have to give. At the end of the day, the wedding is about you and your partner, no one else, make it as weird as you want it to be.”

Congratulations, Jordan and Charlie! All the best from GWS.