Faux Cake
“The wedding was fabulous of course, but did you SEE the cake?! I still can’t believe most of it was fake!!”
– A surprised twenty-four year old
I stared in awe at one of the most beautiful wedding cakes I had ever seen in my entire life [including the ones I had pinned on Pinterest and bookmarked on Instagram]. There, on my friend’s SnapChat story, was an intimidatingly gorgeous four-tiered confectionary masterpiece that one newly wed couple proudly claimed as their wedding cake. I like to think that you, my dear readers, like moi, will have the same shocked facial expression I did when I tell you two of those four tiers were nothing more than fondant covered styrofoam.
If you are anything like my engaged, twenty-something year old friends, your main concern for your wedding is the overall budget. In regard to the money spent between the dress, venue, and other miscellaneous expenses, your food budget takes the cake. Literally. The issue is that many of us want to compromise on a small budget cake in order to properly feed all of your guests that day. We’ve been daydreaming about what our perfect wedding will look like, despite monetary limitations, but not all of us want/need a big over-the-top wedding. A partially fake cake is such a fun and unique idea for those of us that either want a big cake and a small wedding party, or a signature wedding dessert special to the couple that still wants to present a cake despite not serving any. You could even have an entirely fake decorated cake for pictures or as a beautiful decor piece while serving awesome alternatives to cake like 2017’s bonbon towers and this year’s widely popular doughnut wall!
For modern couples who want to follow tradition, (such as saving the top tier for their first anniversary or have the chance to cut the cake together to shove in each other’s faces) you can have a single tier of cake for your use while the other tiers can be purely for a more enjoyable visual aesthetic. The most common choice for couples that choose the faux cake route is using both real and faux cake tiers together. Guests won’t notice (nor should they care) if you decide to present a faux cake and serve sheet cake. However, you should consult your baker about the final cost of choosing both real and fake tiers as some bakers will charge more for a fake cake with served sheet cake. Bakers obviously expect to make a good bit of money off a wedding commission, so some will charge more for regular sheet cake or invoke a “symbolic” fee on the cakes to make up for the cheap styrofoam tiers. If this isn’t the case, your faux cake can still be pricey due to the time and talent that went into decorating (depending on how you want it to look) and not so much the decision to serve something other than the traditional cake. At the end of the day ~Or should I say wedding?~ , whether you want a wedding cake that looks amazing for yourself, your guests, or just to have a sham cake present for the sake of tradition, is ENTIRELY up to you! Design a cake that you will be happy with on your wedding day, in your memory, and in photographs for the rest of your life. If that means using fake tiers to build your dream vision instead of paying for cake no one is going to eat, then go for it!
