Bride’s Friend Rushes to Make Wedding Cake After Baker Cancels (Exclusive)

A bride’s best friend secretly came to her rescue when her wedding cake baker canceled at the last minute.

Deeva Wazir wanted to help her best friend plan her wedding as much as she could because they’re both “still in law school and finances are tight.” So, Wazir took over the wedding cake responsibility and reached out to bakeries in Vancouver to see if any would sponsor the cake in exchange for social media promotion. One bakery agreed but a family emergency caused them to cancel the order just one month before the big day — leaving Wazir to scramble for a solution.

Wazir “panicked at first and felt awful,” but decided to take matters into her own hands. She made the “slightly chaotic” decision to not disclose the cancelation to the bride and groom because if they found out, she knew “they’d just go without a cake” and she “wasn’t going to let that happen.”

“I’d promised my best friend a cake, so I was determined to make it happen no matter what,” Wazir tells PEOPLE.

Wazir considers herself to be a “passionate home cook,” but she had never made a layered cake before, let alone a wedding cake. “Even though [she] had never done anything like that before,” Wazir was up for the daunting challenge of making a three-tiered cake big enough to feed 90 guests.

“I didn’t sleep much the week before the wedding,” Wazir remembers. “I had baking books on my nightstand, my entire TikTok algorithm turned into cake tutorials, and I read every wedding baking blog I could find.”

It took Wazir about two weeks to complete the cake. The top and bottom tiers were flavored strawberry, one of the bride’s favorite flavors. The groom’s favorite flavor, lemon, was the middle tier.

“I made the lemon curd, strawberry jam, and everything else from scratch,” Wazir says, noting that she added “little bride and groom cat toppers to include on the cake as a surprise nod” to the couple’s cat, Coconut.

For the wedding, which took place on July 19, Wazir had to drive the cake from her home in Calgary to the celebration in Vancouver, which is more than a 10-hour-long trip.

Wazir didn’t tell anyone that she made the wedding cake until after the cake was cut.

“I waited until after the cake-cutting ceremony and pulled the bride aside to let her know. She was in total shock (understandably),” Wazir says. “I hadn’t wanted to make the day about me, I just wanted them to enjoy their moment.”

She continues: “Later on, the bride shared the story with guests, and everyone was stunned. A lot of people said it was the first wedding cake they’d ever had that actually tasted good, which shocked me! I gained a huge amount of respect for professional bakers through this. It was not an easy task, but getting to do this for my best friends meant the world to me.”

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Although Wazir wouldn’t recommend the experience, she doesn’t regret it.

“I will never be doing this again, but cooking is my love language, and this was my way of showing love to two people who mean everything to me,” she shares.