Good Gravy...where Are All The Interesting Wedding Cakes?
Decorating By evasmama Updated 9 Feb 2009 , 5:00pm by mariela_ms
I wasn't a 'caker' when I got married, and my mom was, so I let her do whatever she wanted. The end result was beautiful, but like others have said, not my style. If I had it to do again, I'd have something super funky (I didn't even know that stuff existed back then!) and probably topsy turvy. Oh, and most likely I'd have to fly Tonedna up here to do it! 
I just love her work!
DH and I got married in 2000. We were the first I'd ever heard of to use a cake as the centerpiece for each table. So unique that our baker didn't even know how to price those. She charged us $165 for a three tiered cake (head table) and 15 centerpiece cakes! 
That was before I did cakes, so I had NO idea what a deal that was.
I say that to say I've always liked to be the one who is different. I try to talk my brides into "different", but they all want to go mostly traditional too. And if traditional is what they want, then by golly...traditional is what they'll get. Suits me either way. 
I get brides coming in saying "I want some different! I like color! I'm open to anything!"
9 out of 10 walk out with a stacked cake with ribbons at the base and pearls.
Yeah, that's "out there."
I recently had a bride choose a Damask design. I thought the MOB was going to faint. Srsly.
Personally, I think cakes have come a long way from the 80's when I was married...........We thought we were so "big" to have a running fountain in the middle of the tiers!! I guess the only good thing about that was when we cut the cake and fed each other, we could rinse off our fingers in the fountain 
SOOO glad that's not popular anymore.
This year, I get to make this deer cake. The surrounding round cakes will be covered in fondant and airbrushed to look like tree stumps. The entire thing will be surrounded in leaves and lights. I'm pretty nervous about it. I've not done anything this elaborate and am not sure what to charge. The deer only serves 50-75. The body is made out of 4-11x15's. Neat idea. I hope I can pull it off!
http://www.pohlmanscakes.com/portfoliophotos/34.jpg
i love doing funkycakes, but most of the brides i meet with now want traditional..white on white..or white with ribbon in the color of their wedding colors and maybe some flowers. the most out there ive gotten recently was offset squares
That's too funny. That was exactly my wedding cake 4 years ago! Swiss dots, and the buttercream roses on top, cascading down the side. I loved it. It was before I started decorating, but looking back at the pics it was done very well.
I just think "plain" is in right now. Very little embellishments, fondant, maybe some ribbon, etc.
Please forgive my rant...I don't mean to blast anyone's noticeable talent (and there's a lot around here!), but I am picky with what I like.
Where are all of the interesting wedding cakes? If I see one more plain white 3-tier cake with sprays of buttercream flowers down the side and some Swiss dots, I think I'm gonna vomit.
Does anyone specialize in the weird?
My wedding cake in 2003 was simple but semi-funky, inspired by a Martha Stewart design (I was not yet making cakes, so the caterer did it). I loved it, and I rarely see anything cool in today's weddings.
I'm right there with ya!! 
If you look in my pix, I did a 10th anniversary cake for Gilda's Club and even in that I couldn't do just the "normal" comma cake, nooosirreeeebob!!! I had to liven that up just a touch as well! I hear what you are saying though, but perhaps it's because I look at soooo many cakes on a daily basis that most of them seem mundane to me anymore. I guess I'm just a cake snob at heart! 
I wasn't a 'caker' when I got married, and my mom was, so I let her do whatever she wanted. The end result was beautiful, but like others have said, not my style. If I had it to do again, I'd have something super funky (I didn't even know that stuff existed back then!) and probably topsy turvy. Oh, and most likely I'd have to fly Tonedna up here to do it!
I just love her work!
I'll send you the check later for the promo Melvira.. 
... I love you for that!..well and the fact that you have an awesome personality.
Talk about different.. Last week I did a cake. The bride wanted fake flowers and feathers...I gotta look for that photo..I dont know what is with people around me, but they want different. I make wedding cakes sometimes that even I go OMG!
Edna
For my wedding, (not caking yet) I found a cake I liked in a magazine and went with it! 4 tiers, each tier a different color (blue, pink, green, yellow) and had scroll work with that flaky glittery stuff! Everyone loved it, and I never stopped to consider that what anyone else might think of it I *believe* I ran it past my husband first, but Im not sure. I dont think I showed my "mommy" anything but the bill! All your life you hear about how your wedding will be YOUR special day, so I did exactly what I wanted. To this day, people still comment on how nice my cake was and how they remember my cake more than their own.
What's funny is that I just remembered that when my mom went to pay the baker, he told her how much he was looking forward to my cake. I didnt think much of it at the time, thought he was just making small talk with the MOB. Now that I look back, he probably REALLY was excited to have something new to do!!
Personally, I love the traditional look. I'm not talking about from a decorators POV because I am still wet behind the ears BUT from an aesthetic view.
Alos I am in awe of the talent and technique to do a beautiful traditional cake, with all that beautiful piping, stringwork, flowers, etc.
My wedding cake? Couldn't tell you what it looked like. Kinda regret that I didnt pay much attention to it at all.
I'll send you the check later for the promo Melvira..
... I love you for that!..well and the fact that you have an awesome personality. No, no check... just put it toward my big cake!!
By the way I love the old combined with the new..shabby chick..
For my wedding, (not caking yet) I found a cake I liked in a magazine and went with it! 4 tiers, each tier a different color (blue, pink, green, yellow) and had scroll work with that flaky glittery stuff! Everyone loved it, and I never stopped to consider that what anyone else might think of it
I *believe* I ran it past my husband first, but Im not sure. I dont think I showed my "mommy" anything but the bill! All your life you hear about how your wedding will be YOUR special day, so I did exactly what I wanted. To this day, people still comment on how nice my cake was and how they remember my cake more than their own. What's funny is that I just remembered that when my mom went to pay the baker, he told her how much he was looking forward to my cake. I didnt think much of it at the time, thought he was just making small talk with the MOB. Now that I look back, he probably REALLY was excited to have something new to do!!
Do you have a picture you could post? I'd love to see this cake.
What's sad is that the only wedding cakes I remember of all the weddings I've attended over the years are the two that were awful due to the bakery.
One was a white cake covered in white fondant, but the edges of the cake were so dark and the fondant so thin that you could see the overcooked edges through it. Shadows, for lack of a better description. Especially now that I work with fondant, I can't even see how that is possible!
Another was BC meant to look smooth like fondant, but it was a mess, and the piping looked like it had been done with the shakiest of hands. The filling was just a thin smear, thinner than I would put jelly on a PBJ. But the cake was delicious!
So I would rather risk having a funky cake that people will remember because it was atypical, rather than not remember it all or remember it because of an inexperienced decorator.
MacsMom you are SO right! At my wedding my soon-to-be SIL invited one of her girlfriends. At SIL's wedding a few years later that same person (I hadn't seen her since) told me she would never forget my wedding because it was the only one she'd ever been to where you could EAT the food. I catered it myself.
Morning eveyone....
I just came across a great wedding cake...
http://cakecentral.com/cake-photo-1311139.html
After you look at that one look at the rest of her cakes...they are amazing. Some of you probably already know of her, but it's the first i've seen. Her work is beautiful. Of course I still have my other favs too...Edna, Mel, Debi, Fiddles...and many more
oh shoot
Macsmom you were supposed to be on my favs list! I even have your gourmet cake list saved...thanx BTW!
How bad is this? I don't even remember what my cake looked like! I didn't pick it out. I had my mom pick out the cake. I didn't want to be bothered by details of the wedding (and I lived about 4 hours away from my hometown, which is where the wedding was) and my mom was happy to choose the flowers, cake, food, etc. It was great! LOL! The only thing I helped pick out were the bridesmaid dresses and my dress. Everything else is a big giant blur.
My wedding cake was nothing that I asked for. I wanted a beautiful white smooth cake with sugar flowers cascading form it. She used a start tip and did a zigzag pattern in all the sides and top pf the cake..and the flowers!!!!!...they were more like RI dots on wire exploding from the sides of the cakes...My lesson..never use a friend of a family member to do the cake. Second lesson...learn to make cakes, and do them yourself! ...
Edna
My dress and cake were the only things I picked out. My mom and sis handled everything because I was sick for about 4 months.
I loved my dress, but the cake sucked all around. It didn't look anything like the pics and I gave her the topper in advance with the color on it, and it was way off! As far as taste...eeeeewwww...gross,dry,it tasted like someone spilled simple green in it, and it was just a plain vanilla cake!
I do have to say that I was and 80's teen got married in '92 and my cake looked like I designed it when I was...ummm lets say, not in might normal state of mind Oh ya..my wedding colors were fushia and black LOL to bad theres not a gagging smiley! At least it wasn't neon pink!
I LOVED my wedding cake. I didn't pick the bakery, the reception location worked with a local decorator and the cake was included in our package but we got to pick what design we wanted. I really loved the "stacked presents" look so that's what I asked for. My colors were White, Purple and Light Purple. Now that I know more about decorating I realized I gave a tall order. I didn't want any fondant, but she made an AMAZING cake. Still one of my favorite parts of my wedding. It was also delicious, chocolate with chocolate mousse for the bottom and top, and lemon with lemon filling (for the DH) in the middle. It was made by Jill's Cake Creations in Santa Clarita, CA for credit.
Thank you. For my 30th Birthday the following year, my husband went back and got a smaller version (only two tiers) for my birthday cake.
For my wedding, (not caking yet) I found a cake I liked in a magazine and went with it! 4 tiers, each tier a different color (blue, pink, green, yellow) and had scroll work with that flaky glittery stuff! Everyone loved it, and I never stopped to consider that what anyone else might think of it
I *believe* I ran it past my husband first, but Im not sure. I dont think I showed my "mommy" anything but the bill! All your life you hear about how your wedding will be YOUR special day, so I did exactly what I wanted. To this day, people still comment on how nice my cake was and how they remember my cake more than their own. What's funny is that I just remembered that when my mom went to pay the baker, he told her how much he was looking forward to my cake. I didnt think much of it at the time, thought he was just making small talk with the MOB. Now that I look back, he probably REALLY was excited to have something new to do!!
Do you have a picture you could post? I'd love to see this cake.
I dont have any pictures of my cake on this computer (it's been 5+ years) but JenniferMI did one that looks JUST like my cake, except mine had a different topper!
http://www.cakecentral.com/cake-photo_1176973.html
Yep both your cakes were BBBBeeee uuuuu teee fuuulll!!!
Not mine... we still had fun smashing it in each others face, mainly cuz it made DH's Grandma so crazy!!
She was so mad! But thats our personalities, if we didn't do it, then it wouldn't have been us. Besides my DH got to find a piece of it later... it had fell down my dress between my boobies! Oh my gosh it was funny! Did I mention that I actually forgot to pack anything for our honeymoon! DUH! We left right after the reception too. I mean no clothes, toothbrush, makeup...nothing, oh the memories! It wasn't too bad, I didn't really need any clothes the first 2 days
all4cake- that seven tier classic that was done by Wendy Kromer in collaboration with Martha was my inspiration for my show cake. I even contacted Wendy and asked her about the cake and told her what I wanted to do. She helped me create the bevel for my cake.
I love classic designs. I love the "funky" ones as well but have no desire to even create one. I'll do it if asked of course but I love traditional.
I do take a mild offense to the boring "plain white with buttercream flowers and swiss dot cakes" comment by the OP! A few years ago that was all I knew I could do well. Some brides are traditionalists and like that "plain" look. Beginning decorators doing a cake of such design are proud of themselves if they can create 50 plus buttercream flowers and put on a wedding cake. I just don't want to see the dreams of a new decorator out there put so far out of reach before they even start all because someone thinks the design is plain and boring.
JMO!!!
That all said, we have a fantastic array of traditional and wild and funky wedding cakes here on CC. I encourage new decorators here to check them out and be inspired.
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