Wedding cake not as expected - any redress?

[lelole]

HI,

 

We recently got married abroad, and we followed it up with a reception in our town for friends and family which we held this weekend.

 

Some time ago, when planning the reception, we decided to go for a French style croquembouche instead of a traditional wedding cake, so we could also serve it as a dessert - we were on a tight budget and I love profiteroles. In addition we were so excited because it is an unusual choice, and is (normally) a very impressive tall tower of profiteroles held together with spun sugar. The people who do the cakes run a cafe in a nearby town, and I found them by doing a search for Croquembouche. We rang them and they invtied us to the cafe and we got to sit and try the profiteroles which were lovely and decided to go ahead an order one. We left a deposit and then communicated by email for the remaining details of decoration and payment.

 

When I arrived at the reception venue that afternoon my heart sank. We had hoped to have the creation we had asked for to be wheeled in at the end of the speeches but when I saw what they had done, I nearly cried and decided to hide it in the kitchen rather than show it off. I couldn't believe that they were happy with it, and that they hadn't rung me to let me know. They still haven't contacted me.

 

It was a short pile of profiteroles (it should have been tall and elegant), very scruffy and wonky. Each profiterole was covered in a scruffy lump of icing, and the whole stack was wonky, and dumpy like I mentioned. There was no spun sugar, and to be honest I think I could have done better by going to sainsbury's and buying a load of profiterole stacks and piling them on top of each other!

 

We had hoped that the profiteroles would be nice and all would not be lost, but over half of the stack was left over, and the profiteroles were very dry (very little filling and wrong pastry).

 

My question is after this long rant (sorry!) is do we have any recourse? I don't have any written contract which they provided (more fool me!) just the emails talking about payment and the flower types we wanted to decorate with.

 

Thanks in advance for your help!

[perplexity]

I don't have any written contract which they provided (more fool me!) just the emails talking about payment and the flower types we wanted to decorate with.

 

 

Presuming that an exchange of emails amounts to an agreement to pay for goods described, that is a written contract, but not necessarily the entirety of a contract of sale.

 

You are entitled to reject unsatisfactory goods and claim for breach of contract, simple as that. From there on it is a question of fact and proof.

 

In any case, if the gist of the complaint is that the trader's actions caused or were "likely to cause the average consumer to take a transactional decision he would not have taken otherwise, taking account of its factual context and of all its features and circumstances", that is a strict liability criminal offence, according to The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008

 

Assuming a fair chance to prove the charge, I would give them the choice of refunding the money, or a prosecution before a Magistrate.