Bride and Groom Build Giant DIY Wedding Cake Stage With Toilet Brushes From Temu: See the Photos! (Exclusive)

Sam Hwang and Logan Corona created a larger-than-life dessert stage for wedding guests to use as an interactive photo backdrop

After being quoted $16,000 for a stage that looked like a wedding cake, a bride and groom took matters into their own hands and built it themselves.

As a founder of two wedding businesses, The Mad Florist and For the Table, Sam Hwang, 27, knew she had to go all out for her wedding to Logan Corona, 28. The couple had a message phone booth, vintage Thunderbird convertible and more at their Sept. 26 wedding at Penny Lane Ranch, but their custom-made platform took the cake (literally).

The California couple, who knew of each other in high school but didn't romantically connect until after college, has now gone viral on TikTok for DIY-ing their giant wedding cake stage, which took three weekends to finish but saved them thousands of dollars.

"By making it ourselves, we spent probably around $3,000 total, including material costs and transport costs, so we saved over half the amount," Hwang tells PEOPLE.

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To create the stage on a budget, the newlyweds sourced a pre-made wood stage from Event Decor Direct and plastered it. They also did piping on the sides of the stage and used silicone molds for the frosting.

The real-life "cherries on top" were made from cherry-shaped toilet brushes the couple bought from online marketplace Temu, placed on top of foam balls. Hwang got the idea to use the Temu brushes because she already had one in her bathroom and knew it cost significantly less than the cherry sculptures she was seeing online.

"When I was looking up fabricating more of a life-size cherry, it was at least $200 each. So that's when the idea came up," she explains. "I was like, 'Well, we have a cherry plunger downstairs. Let's use that.' That's $5 from Temu versus $200."

After Hwang and Corona made minor touch-ups at the venue, their vision for a grand reception display came to life.

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"We wanted to make everything seem very personable to us," says Hwang, who got engaged to Corona in April 2023 after three years of dating. "The cake stage motif was just something that we wanted to create together. We knew that with our past, I've always been more creative. My husband is very handy and can build a lot of things and we've done that in the past for various house projects, so building something like that made sense for our wedding."

The couple's 85 wedding guests loved the interactive photo backdrop.

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"Some of the older guests were just in disbelief," Hwang tells PEOPLE. "They didn't know that we could have stood on it. A lot of our closer friends knew we were building it, and so seeing it in real life I think just shocked a lot of people, especially because in the photos, it seems smaller than it really is in real life. So yeah, just transporting all of that and being able to build it was really fun and a great surprise for our guests."

On Halloween, Hwang announced that the oversized cake stage is now available for rent in California from For the Table for $1,500 a day.