Without a doubt, one of the best parts of wedding planning is designing (and sampling) your wedding cake. You get to work with a wedding cake designer to play around with different designs, icing styles, flavours and more to create the confection of your dreams, which is pretty darn awesome. If you’re stumped on what style of wedding cake to choose for your big day, take inspiration from the hottest trends in the baking biz. Don’t forget to compliment your cake with the perfect wedding lighting – see our wedding lighting inspiration gallery for more examples.
Elevated Naked Cakes
Naked wedding cakes have been trendy for a while, but nowadays bakers are getting a bit more adventurous with the style by adding drips, interesting toppers, multiple cake flavours and different colours to the mix. By going this route, you’ll still get the look you know and love but with a dash more creativity.
Ruffled Cakes
Move over naked cakes, ruffled designs are becoming the fan favourite for rustic weddings this year. They’re sweet, they’re simple and they look absolutely gorgeous. While plain white frosting seems to be the winner, you can easily shake up the design by making it ombre or using a deeper hue of buttercream. You can also swap out the typical horizontal ruffles for vertical designs for a fresh take. Add a few flowers or a bit of greenery to the top of yours and you’ll have a truly photo-worthy wedding cake on your hands.
Drip Cakes
Drip designs are probably one of the hottest wedding cake trends at the moment. You can use just about any base style – be that naked, semi-naked, celestial, floral or something else – and then top it with a drip to elevate its look. This is a great way to incorporate your colour scheme into your cake if you’re going with a more monochrome palette as its foundation.
Metallic Cakes
Make your wedding cake shine with a metallic design in silver, gold or rose gold! You can go all out and order a confection that shimmers from top to bottom or accent it with some shiny graphics, brush strokes, dragées, gold leaf or toppers. If you’re feeling super adventurous, go ahead and pair it with one of the other trendy styles on this list.
Dark and Dramatic Cakes
The traditional all-white wedding cake style isn’t for everyone! If you don’t want to stick to the status quo, opt for a dark and dramatic design. A dose of black, maroon, navy or forest green food colouring will really make your tiers pack a punch. P.S. this works with just about any design – minimalist, super patterned, decorative and everything in between.
Botanical Cakes
It seems like just about everyone is head over heels for houseplants and wildflowers these days, and the obsession has reached beyond homes and gardens and into the wonderful world of wedding cakes. Now, we’re not talking traditional flower toppers – we’re talking about absolutely covering cakes in florals. You can ask your cake maker to use legit blooms, hand-painted florals or have them craft icing, chocolate or sugar flowers, any way works!
Brush Stroke Cakes
Give your wedding cake some artistic flare by going with a brush stroke design. Here’s how it works: chocolate is melted and hardened on wax paper and used to make a textured, feather-esque design that you just can’t achieve with malleable frostings, buttercream or fondant. A cake like this is bound to grab your guests’ eyes, so don’t get too jealous if you catch them checking out your dessert table instead of paying attention to you.
Geometric Cakes
If you’re going for a modern or minimalist wedding theme, a geometric design may be the best wedding cake trend to embrace. Whether you want patterned tiers decorated with pentagons and parallelograms or layers cut into interesting shapes like hexagons and octagons, your baker can probably make your confection dreams come true. Also, this style looks killer in black and white, white on white and in colour, so you really can’t go wrong.
Dessert-Topped Cakes
Forget about classic wedding cake toppers like figurines and fresh flowers, go for fun, funky and out-there additions. You’ll see everything from cereal coated-tiers to mini donut toppers gracing the most stylish confections. Bonus: if cake isn’t your favourite sweet treat, you can always ditch the cake and opt for a different dessert, like a donut, truffle or macaron tower (they’re super trendy, too!).
Celestial Cakes
Think your love was written in the stars? Well, why not throw some constellations onto your wedding cake? Tiers covered in sparkling metallic stars, nebulas and other spacey graphics are all the rage right now, so your confection is guaranteed to be a hit. P.S. if you don’t want to go with a full-blown starry cake, you could always just do a single accent layer or a celestial topper.
Mix and Match Cakes
Can’t decide which design you love best? Go with a few! Mix and match tiers allow you to incorporate several different styles into your wedding cake. You can do rosettes, ruffles, hand-painted designs, different shapes and metallics all in one cake, all you need is a bit more height (sorry, sheet cake lovers). Also, remember to choose a similar colour scheme for all your tiers, so that everything goes together.
Summary
Whatever cake you decide to go for, choosing a wedding cake that represents the couple is a meaningful and personal decision. The wedding cake should add a unique touch to the celebration and be a canvas for expressing the couple’s individuality and shared interests, making the celebrating more intimate and memorable.
Ultimately, choosing a wedding cake that represents the couple is a way to infuse the celebration with personal meaning, making the entire experience more unique, special, and reflective of the couple’s love story.
