Choices for Wedding Cakes

The wedding cake will often play the central focus at the reception, representing the couple’s new life together and tying in with the colour theme of the wedding. In today’s wedding industry a wedding cake can be crafted into any shape, size or colour the couple requires meaning the options are seemingly limitless.

Wedding Cake Flavour Choices

The first thing a couple does before settling on what cake they want is to decide on its flavor, which will also establish some design options and decorations. The main choices for wedding cakes are the traditional fruit cake, chocolate cake and chiffon cake. Obviously personal taste will affect which of these options a couple will go for with chocolate popular as a crowd pleaser while chiffon cakes are ideal for lighter and simpler design.

Wedding Cake Design

• Layered Design - The use of layers in cakes is quite common because they add class and elegance to its overall appearance while also supplying a generous amount of cake for the guests.  

• Floral Design – this is where flowers are added to the design of the cake, either real flowers or artificial iced flowers, which can add both height and romance to the cakes appearance. Often the flowers used will be the same as the bridal bouquet to tie the cake in with the overall wedding theme.

• Custom Design – couple choosing their own shape and style of cake based on their own preferences

Icing Options

• Buttercream - two methods of creating buttercream known as the Swiss method and the Italian method, generally has a very sweet taste.

• Cream Cheese – mixed with butter, sugar and lemon zest (or any flavouring such as a liquor), this icing is ideal

• Fondant – able to be used for both icing the cake and its decorations, this is a essentially a sugar syrup

• Marzipan – made using almonds (around 25 per cent pure almonds) Marzipan is ideal for icing and creating substantial decorations and shapes on the cake itself due to its thick consistency.

• Royal Icing – made with sugar and egg whites

• Sugar paste – made with icing sugar and gum based paste, sugar paste is good for decorative flowers on a cake

As far as colours are concerned, wedding cake icing can be made into any colour possible which makes matching a cake to a colour scheme incredible simple.

Wedding Cake Toppers

Finally there are wedding cake toppers which further personalise and style your cake to represent you as a couple and your overall wedding theme. There is a significant range of wedding cake toppers including comical to traditional to personalised. The most common cake toppers include:

• Monogram Toppers – the initials of the newlyweds
• Word Cake Toppers – complete words iced into the cake, such as the full names
• Figurines – such as a bride and groom or wedding bells
• Shapes- such as hearts, flowers, castles, or birds
• Jewels – metallic decorations used across the cake