Modern Wedding Cakes

Modern brides and brides that have their own individual style are taking traditional wedding cake designs and traditions and putting their own unique spin on them to create new trends that reflect both a bride’s individuality and the traditions of the past. Here are some of the top trends in modern wedding cake design:

Using Letterpress Designs

Brides are choosing to customize their cakes to mirror the engraving on their invitations, the embroidery on their dresses, even their favorite china pattern. Using modern letterpress designs mimics the old cake decorating methods but gives them a modern twist. Cake decorators can press the designs into rolled fondant icing, cut them out, and arrange them on the cake and then decorate around them.  Letterpress cake decorating is a beautiful way to create a signature wedding cake that is both traditional and modern.

Going Back to Basic Colors

Brides and cake designers are using more believable, natural colors in their creations. Gone are the vivid primary colors that were in fashion in the past few decades. Brides and cake designers are choosing natural hues for decorating, such as using varying shades of red and pink to adorn sugar roses winding up the tiers of white cake with realistic looking leaves and vines curling behind them.  Using photographs as a base for cake designs and using the natural colors of the items in the photographs is very trendy.  So is going back to soft, delicate colors for the main cake, like off white, sand, pale pink, pale green, and other soft, soothing tones.  Decorations are understated and realistic in modern cake decorating trends.

Create a Signature Silhouette

Using colored fondant to create decorating silhouettes is a very popular trend in modern wedding cake decorating. It’s all about personalization these days so personalizing a wedding cake with silhouette cutouts of the bride and groom’s initials, a signature emblem, a signature flower, or even a symbol of a hobby that the two share or a symbol of how they met are very popular. 

One couple who met at a coffee shop had fondant silhouette coffee cups decorating their wedding cake as a fun reminder of where their relationship started.  Another couple who met on a blind date at a restaurant had silhouette wine glasses on the wedding cake.

Silhouettes that reflect the theme or location of the wedding are also popular.  For a winter wedding, silhouettes of snowflakes would be fun.  For a holiday wedding, silhouettes of Christmas trees or gaily wrapped gifts would be different and festive.  For a summer wedding, silhouettes of summer flowers or butterflies would be a great way to incorporate the season into the design of the cake.

Over the Top Flowers

In the past, brides went for exactingly decorated cakes covered in Lambeth Method piped flowers that were small and delicate, but the modern trend is for Wilton Method over the top sugar paste flowers in exaggerated sizes. So instead of having ten small orchids piped around the sides of the wedding cake, a modern bride might go for one huge orchid on the top of the cake.  Proportion and color are the tools used to make the design stand out and be interesting instead of using tons of tiny flowers to create a floral effect.

Playing with Shape

Another trend that modern brides are embracing is playing with shape and proportion.  Using a traditional tiered design, a modern bride might add her own twist by having tiers made up of different shapes like having a hexagon shaped tied on the bottom topped by a square tier topped by a circle.  Having tiers made in different shapes gives a fun modern twist to the traditional tiered wedding cake.

Even though these trends will probably become outdated fairly quickly since each generation of brides will want to put their own unique stamp on their wedding cakes, it’s nice that the trends happening now have found a way to work in traditional wedding cake motifs with modern materials and designs to maintain an element of the past while also embracing the future.

Pricey wedding cake designs are usually very trendy but more traditional wedding cakes can cost much less so there will always be brides who will opt for more traditional and less expensive wedding cakes so that they can stick to a budget for their weddings.

In the past, big extravagant weddings were the norm and it wouldn’t be unusual for a bride to spend thousands of dollars on a wedding cake but people are more financially savvy these days and smaller, more economical weddings are growing in popularity. 

With the growing emphasis on keeping weddings affordable, the ultra high end designer wedding cakes will probably give way to smaller, more traditional wedding cakes with maybe a small modern twist here or there.