World of Unusual Wedding Cakes

A competition to find the most Unusual Wedding Cake would be a hard fought contest. Many couples have abandoned the traditional white tiered fruitcake confection topped with its miniature black suited groom and blushing bride in her foaming white dress. Now there are a huge variety of unusual wedding cakes to choose from offering more personal styles with flavours that suit today's ever-wider choices and tastes.

Themed wedding cakes have become really popular and if you want a unique and original design that has significance to you why not design your own to suit your own personal tastes. Football boots or golf clubs for the sports fans out there. Or R2D2 replicas for all those Jedi knights.

In different parts of the world the style of this central part of the traditional wedding feast features many different shapes and ingredients. Birdcages, birds of paradise flower and pretty kitten cats, anything goes. The cake is a centrepiece for the reception. It is elaborately decorated and given a position of honour. Wedding cakes in France and Belgium tend to follow the more traditional style of the croquembouche, a cone made of round cream-filled pastries which is dipped in hot toffee. In India, the multi-tiered fruit-based cake takes on a somewhat new twist. A high, "dummy cake," covered in sugar icing may be used. A slice of real cake is inserted into the dummy cake for the cake cutting but what the guests get to eat is not the cake, but instead, a piece of the icing. In Japan wedding cakes take on an entirely different form and artificial cakes, with "icing" of hard wax were often used. Brazilian brides and Grooms give wedding guests a favour called a Bem Casados instead of a wedding cake. This is two pieces of pastry sandwiched together with a caramel cream. They are made in different shapes including hearts, doves and rings. The Italians also replace the cake but with a type of cookie. In Italian it's called a "wanda." And they are arranged in a cake shape on a table. Guests perform a chain dance called the Wanda as well where they parade past the table and each grab one of cookies as they pass by.
The island of Bermuda add to their wedding cakes, a small tree. The day after the marriage, the newlyweds are planting this tree in their garden where they can watch it grow throughout their life together.

So whether its chocolate and cherries, juicy fruits and berries, fairytale castles, hat boxes and parcels, cascade of lace, aliens from space, pretty cats in straw hats, football boots or tennis bats, unusual wedding cakes are an important and symbolic tradition within marriage everywhere.