Sometime between The Cupcake Tower Coup of 2014 and The Great Donut Wall Uprising Of 2016, the traditional wedding cake died. You're much more likely to see white fondant and piped rosettes in your mom's wedding album than on any modern bride's "Dream Wedding <3" Pinterest boards. Counter-culture cakes have become the new normal—and you won't believe what actually counts as a "cake" these days.
We should have seen it coming, right? Today's weddings have become hyper-personal—a true reflection of the couple—and the whole cake to-do of yesteryear can feel all too generic in the same way other passé wedding traditions can. That's how we got here—to the love-filled land of non-white cakes and non-cake cakes. You guys, 2019 is wild.
"I can take the regular structure of a cake, tiers sitting one on top of the other, and make it totally unusual and avant grade by changing the color or the texture," Ron Ben-Israel of Ron Ben-Israel Wedding Cakes and many-a-Food-Network-show fame starts in. Ben-Israel was one of the first to lead the charge in ultra-luxury wedding cakes—and ultra-unusual ones at that. (He's the mastermind behind those topsy-turvy tiers you still see every so often.) Ben-Israel's clientele—typically higher-end, New York City-based couples—unfailingly want their cakes to be different, "but it’s not enough to say 'I want something different.' You have to be willing to play," he says.
It was a creative and courageous couple who led him to begin playing with black fondant. Then came gray and deep blue fondant hues. Along with black, cakes covered in those dark hues have surged in popularity, with requests skyrocketing over the last couple years. Albeit, most couples ask for said darker cakes to be speckled with edible 24-karat gold or silver, but still—dark cakes.
"It's the perfect way to hold on to the tradition of a show-stopping, gorgeous wedding cake while making it feel new, exciting, and equally as photo-worthy," Ben-Israel confirms, noting cakes like the black one you see above start at around $1,500 (which is...expensive, but not New York City expensive): "When we ice a cake to look like cement or snakeskin, or if we make it black rather than white, it'll still be recognizable as a wedding cake."
If black is too harsh a turn, there are always other ways to stray from the norm. Unusual colors and edible gold are all Jasmine Clouser's clients want right now. (She's the cake artist and owner at The Couture Cakery in Lemoyne, PA.) Clouser is also seeing increases in almost entirely naked cakes—meaning they're 90 percent any kind of cake and 10 percent icing. Baked’s head decorator Betty Wu has seen an extraordinary spike in requests for ombré cakes this year. Specifically, people are asking for "colors speckled onto a classic white cake," including chocolate browns, yellows, and, most of all, blues. The latter is another way of holding onto one tradition while bucking another: Consider it 2019's answer to something blue.
Nearly every single cake expert interviewed for this piece mentioned they've worked with couples who either "had an aversion to cake" or "just didn’t like it." It turns out a lot of people (…and their Instagram followers) think there are cooler things out there in the world than wedding cakes—like wedding waffles or wedding pancakes or, you know, wedding cheese.
In fact, wedding cheese is one of the non-cake cakes vendors across the country—nay, the world—are accommodating the most, which is interesting because it originated in higher-end boutique cheese shops like Murray's Cheese. The OG cheese cake pioneer now offers a range of totally affordable, if daintier cheese cakes (like the $165 one pictured above) to uber-luxe-oh-wow bonafide towers. San Francisco's Cheese School has mastered the art of curating these wheel cakes to suit couples' specific tastes. For example, The French is an exploration of the Loire and Burgundy regions, while The Local is a lower-key Californian stack.
Most people still require actual dessert at their weddings, though—and as much as Europe tries to convince us, cheese is not dessert. Macaron mountains, cinnamon bun steeples (the Cinnabon creation up top, for example, which was created by stacking more than a dozen $4 classic cinnamon buns on top of each other—cheapest wedding cake ever!), crepe cakes: They’re all now being sliced into during cake cutting ceremonies, forever immortalized in pictures as what a couple considered monumental enough to call their "wedding cake." Feastivities co-founder Meryl Snow recently made a watermelon wedding cake that was literally "all-fruit watermelon tiers adorned with chocolate-covered pineapples, berries, and grapes" for a couple who decided to buck both trend and tradition and go with something they both just liked better.
"Most people are not going to go away from that traditional cake or that traditional aspect of the cake, but they are going to put a spin on it that matches their personality," WeddingWire's creative director Jeffra Trumpower says. She calls what they end up swapping in "un-cake cakes." The Knot’s style and trends editor Alyssa Longobucco confirms: "Bakers are mixing up their offerings so they can please everyone."
6 Un-Cake Cakes That'll Wow Guests
The modern day cake consultation can end up running a little something like an episode of Portlandia. Couples are more cognizant of their environmental impact than ever before, which bleeds into every aspect of their weddings—cakes included. So they're working with local vendors to ensure the eggs, butter, and other potentially conflict-riddled cake ingredients are coming from a place they feel comfortable with. "People are very conscious about the sourcing of their food and their ingredients, so we’ve seen a lot of eating locally and in-season," Longobucco says.
This 2019 dessert wokeness allows people to play with a myriad of bite-sized sweets that riff on the traditional cake—like mini cupcakes (yes, they're still a thing—they'll always be a thing), donuts (on or off a wall), or cinnamon rolls. The impact is two-fold: It eliminates the need for cake-cutting, which venues often charge for, and it requires less cocktail napkins and utensils that need to be washed.
Etsy’s resident trend expert Dayna Isom Johnson agrees the sustainable attitude toward wedding cakes isn’t going anywhere, even if it doesn’t seemingly affect the cake itself. “Sustainable wedding decor is one of the biggest trends for 2019,” she says. Over the past three months, Etsy has “seen over 58,000 searches for ‘wooden cake toppers,’ one of many eco-friendly options. Shoppers are interested in everything from recycled materials to vintage items that can be brought back to life as wedding decor. [As a] bonus, vintage pieces can double as home decor after the big day and become a cherished keepsake.” Conversely, the site is selling less and less wire-wrapped and metal cake toppers, which, wouldn’t you know it, are not only not environmentally friendly, but are also harder to stick in anything that’s not a traditional wedding cake.
At the end of the day, guests are going to eat what you give them. They love to eat! They love your love! (In other words: "A wedding is still a wedding, no matter how you slice it," Shey Jacobs laughs.) They might not love that you want to give them cheap, savory, or tongue-staining, fondant-covered dessert, but we can guarantee you this: They'll 'gram it anyway.
