In 2018 our journey as wedding planners led us to the Grace Ormonde conference in the Bahamas. And that is where we met Elizabeth Solaru, founder of Elizabeth’s Cake Emporium. We wanted to share her extraordinary wedding cakes that are recognized as the best in the United Kingdom.
Cakes have become such an important part of the wedding celebration. Our clients are often overwhelmed with so many choices and styles to choose from. One constant is they want the cake to be part of the event design and is usually VERY BIG.
We are lucky to share with you the insider tips of UK’s premier wedding cake designer to help you choose the perfect cake!
The last few years has seen the emergence of statement wedding cakes which are usually tall, grand and impressive in size and scale. These cakes command attention and although usually requested by brides getting married in a palace or grand country house, we have seen brides getting married on chateaus make similar requests.
Why have one wedding cake when 3, 4 or even 5 will do? A step up from the luxury dessert table, cakescapes provide a way of having multiple complimentary wedding cake designs incorporating brides’ favourite design details and cake flavours. The look on the dessert table is very pleasing with multiple cakes in the same style but different decor
Monogrammed cakes are the ultimate in personalisation. Although monograms have been used on luxury wedding cakes for a while, it’s repeated use on Princess Eugenie and Jack Broksbank’s wedding cake brought it to the mainstream.
The humble donut had always felt like a poor relative next to it’s more sophisticated and chic sister, the macaron. However, as we hark back to our favourite childhood flavours, there is a wish to incorporate them into our celebrations. The donut has now been transformed from an ugly duckling into an elegant swan, with an increasing number of brides requesting them.
At Elizabeth’s Cake Emporium, we are known for making bright and colourful wedding cakes for couples who are looking for something off the beaten track. Colour is a fabulous way to add character to your wedding cake. The colour of your wedding cake is also influenced by your reception theme and venue and the time of year you are getting married. As the rule book has been torn up in 2019, a rich cake colour is also a way to push boundaries and add an element of non conformity.
Pantone recently declared Living Coral as the colour of the year 2019. With its hues of deep peach and pink, we will see this colour used in product development, in the fashion industry, home furnishings, graphic design and we daresay, in the wedding industry too. Once again, we seem to be ahead of the curve and featured this colour in our book OPULENCIA – Artisan Baking and Sugarcraft.
It was lovely to see the art of sugar flowers being revived in luxury wedding cakes and a great example was Princess Eugenie’s autumnal floral fantasy. Sugar flowers have always been a firm favourite with us, and while the most popular sugar flowers we use on wedding cakes include the rose, peony, dahlia and the hydrangea, we also create more exotic ones such as parrot tulips, ranunculi and Chinese lanterns.
Traditionally, luxury wedding cakes as popularised by Queen Victoria had always been white as it denoted purity and was also a status symbol as only wealthy families could afford pure white sugar. While still a popular cake colour, it can look rather flat in photographs. In 2019, brides love the fact that adding texture in various forms can elevate a cake and add dimension. Textures can be in the form of sugar ruffles, frills, geodes, torn edible wafer, pearls, or even edible sequins.
Hand painted cakes are such a delight to behold. From watercolour washes, painted flowers, scripted prints and contemporary graphics painted cakes are literarily edible works of art that delight and astonish and they will continue to grow in popularity in 2019.
Wedding cake shapes can range from round, oblongs, heart and petal shaped to the more geometric square, hexagons and octagons. Round is the much preferred shape by many brides as it the shape of a wedding ring and it denotes a continuous circle of unbroken love. However, some brides are brave enough to opt for unique, unconventional cake shapes as they break away from the norm.