Things are changing with wedding traditions to be sure. Lighting the unity candle is sometimes skipped over for sand ceremonies. Sending a couple off on their honeymoon with rice and bird seed has been replaced with sparklers and hand-held streamers. But cake. Who says no to cake? People are adding ice cream sandwiches and cupcakes, food trucks with themed parfaits and little bags of take-away sweet treats may sometimes replace a piece of the cake. But the cake has not gone away and I doubt it ever will.

For starters, wedding cakes are just so beautiful. Why have all of these baking shows and competitions and Cake Wars and Best Kids Baking or Kids’ Best Baking or WHATEVER Championship on the Food Network if cakes aren’t going to be a BIG part of the wedding for years to come? THAT’S WHAT I WANNA KNOW! But seriously. The fondant, the fresh flowers, the tiers, the layers and filling, the tiers ….where did it come from?

The tiered wedding cake found its origin during the Anglo-Saxon period (think: England had recently been invaded by Scandinavians, or 410 to 1066 BC) and it was a way to bring community into the couple’s celebration. Two families were joining to make one at the wedding, but the couple was also being supported and loved by their neighbors and friends. And in those days, they were feasting and sharing. People came to celebrate and to eat.

Guests would bring cakes to the wedding to share and for space, people would stack the cakes with the largest on the bottom and the littlest at the top, creating a graduated/tiered effect. You can imagine how this looked considering each cake came from a different house. Many many, years later, a Frenchman took the concept of stacking and created a cake in that same arrangement and then iced them all together into one dessert to be shared by many.

Since then, wedding cake have become more adorned, more grand, more intimate in the details, more elaborate in scale and now couples are only limited by their taste buds and the imagination of their pastry chef.

I look back at the cakes that Ryan and I have photographed and shake my head in admiration. I cannot believe the amount of detail, the hours of labor and creativity, the amount of sugar, eggs, flour and butter that have gone into every single one of these cakes… all of which were eaten and digested!! These aren’t at the Smithsonian, people.

Yum. Cake. Time to get my pans out and hit the kitchen.

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