Wedding Cakes

A wedding cake has to be better than good—it has to be beautiful, super-delicious, and photogenic, too. Now, thanks to award-winning cake decorator Karen Goble, anyone with ordinary kitchen skills can create a home-baked work of art worthy of the fanciest reception. Suitable for those new to cake decorating, this exciting and innovative collection of 22 simple, but extremely effective wedding designs is complete with illustrated techniques for stacking cakes using pillars and separators, and festooning each layer with sugarpaste or chocolate. It also includes luscious recipes for the cake itself—including Madeira, chocolate, carrot, and fruit.

"The earliest recipe recorded fromsic Britain for a dish specifically for a wedding is in fact a pie," writes Charsley, an anthropologist at the University of Glasgow. The wedding cake as we know it today–with its successively smaller layers, supporting pillars, fancy frosting and festoons–had its origins some hundred years later, in a confection that commemorated the marriage of one of Queen Victoria's daughters in 1859. Even then, a few refinements were missing: only the base tier was actually cake (the rest were pure sugar), and the layers were stacked like hat boxes. It would take the wedding of Prince Leopold in 1882 before guests could enjoy an entirely "cake" wedding cake, and another 20 years before the tiers were separated by columns (usually disguised pieces of a broom handle).