That moment right there. That moment was the moment when I realized how equally cool wedding cake was and understood just how different our two countries were about wedding cake. For starters, that’s not a fluffy cake we’re cutting into, it’s a fruit cake made thick with dried fruit and soaked in tons of brandy. Secondly, that’s some damn thick icing and there’s ribbon at the bottom. And, no one expect us to a) cut a slice of it out or b) feed it to each other! But see, that right there again, that’s me being an American with my own experiences of wedding cake. You could be anywhere in the world. The great thing about being a bi-national couple–and planning two weddings–is that you get to have more than one cake. (And sometimes four…)
If I haven’t already said this enough times: Alex and I love food. Planning-our-holidays-around-where-we-get-to-eat kind of love food. So, designing our wedding cake(s) was just another bonus in the wedding planning process and, with our focus being to have each piece of our wedding have special meaning to us, we wanted our cakes to say the same.
British Cakes
A month after I proposed, Alex and I found ourselves at a family gathering for her grandma’s 80th birthday. Her aunt had made a gorgeous fruit cake with icing roses on it and individual fruit cakes (the size of a can of beans!) for each of us to take home after the party. Not knowing that her aunt was such a cake enthusiast–or so good at making them!– we hadn’t considered a family member making our UK wedding cake. But after that day, the idea was sealed. We knew our colours were purple and green and that we wanted real flowers. From the initial discussions we threw around different ideas–like having purple icing; but her aunt quickly cautioned us against having all of our guests having purple tongues on our wedding night–and finally settled on a 2-tier fruit cake with white icing, a thick purple ribbon with a thin green ribbon, fresh flowers on a silver board. For our cake toppers, we found old letterpress stamps of ‘A & E’ at Spitalfields Market in London.
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