Choosing a wedding cake

The sweet job of tasting the cake!

A wedding that takes the cake needs a wedding cake that's worth it. I am a massive pastry enthusiast, and I can probably guarantee that about 67% of my body weight is made up of cake. In line with this strange but true addiction to, and obsession with, cake, it was only natural that buying my wedding cake was one of the next things to conquer on the list of things to do.

Armed with a number of wedding cake pictures from back issues of Bride To Be, I headed down to my reception's cake maker of choice, Celebration Cakes in Canterbury, fairly confident that one of my pictures would take the cut.

I was treated to a taste testing of their various flavours, and seated at a computer armed with a pen and worksheet, which implored me to run through a slideshow of images of hundreds of cakes, and write their codes down and the reasons why I liked them. Afterwards, staff member Pamela and I would go through each of the cakes that I had written something about and discuss the reasons why I liked them, and ways of incorporating those elements into my own design.

While there were plenty of cake designs and options to choose from, I was plagued with indecision, and still clung to one of the pictures that I had bought with me. Despite being encouraged to choose from their range, I still wanted the one I had come in with, and after some discussion and customisation, I was able to select it according to a number of modifications based on their capabilities and equipment.

I sampled a mango and coconut cake, a choc mud, a marble mud, a hazelnut cake, and a raspberry and white choc cake, but the raspberry was by far my favourite. However, I didn't think it was a flavour that would cater to all my guests, so I went with the marble mud. My top tier, however, would be a fruit cake, as that was the only type guaranteed to last until our first anniversary.

As I told James about the experience later, he was gobsmacked at the cost of the cake, which by the standards of wedding cakes was not that expensive. For brides on a budget, I actually urge you to consider having a kitchen cake (which comes iced, though not decorated) to increase the number of slices. I did this and was thus able to include the raspberry flavour in my cake too.

And one more tip: Even at the risk of increasing the cost, ask for delivery to your location – those cakes are huge and heavy, and the last thing you want is for it to arrive in pieces. And why not ask your reception to fit the bill of the cake, or even contribute something to the cost of it, to help you out a little? A little bit of bargaining went a long way for me, and I was able to knock my cake cost back after the reception agreed to funding a portion of it. After all, it's fun to have your cake; and eat it too.