Wedding Cakes: Top New Trends for Weddings 2012
Wedding cake trends change swiftly and beautifully….just like wedding dress trends. From elegant simplicity to wild and whimsical colors, today’s wedding cake captures the personalities of the bride and groom, suits the season, fits the formality and delights wedding guests as a centerpiece of the reception ballroom décorand eventually as a delectable highlight of the dessert hour.
Wedding Cakes
Here are the top trends for wedding cakes in 2012:
Height: Wedding cakes are getting taller in 2012, not just with the number of tiers but rather with the height of each tier in the creation of an elevated cake.
Flavors: In 2011 weddings, red velvet cake was all the rage, and now that trend is fading out in 2012, in favor of exotic flavors such as pomegranate, blackberry blueberry, fig, orange chocolate, and blends of creamy textures with exotic fruits. One top flavor composition is a moist cake with a fruit filling, such as white chiffon with blackberry mousse or banana cake with crème brulee filling or chocolate wedding cake with white chocolate mousse and raspberry filling. In addition to fruit-filled cake, we’re also seeing carrot cake with cream cheese filling holding on as a favorite of our brides and grooms.
Invitation-Inspired: Wedding cakes of 2011 were very much designed to look like wedding couture, with layers and folds of fondant to look like wedding dress fabric, and sparkling accents to mimic the crystals or rhinestones on the bride’s dress. Now, cakes are taking their inspiration from the wedding invitation, namely the layers of textured paper, vellums, fabrics, pearlized borders and the colors the bride and groom have chosen in their wedding invitation design.
Colors: Wedding cakes are returning to all-white for a pristine, elegant simplicity that is hand-painted and hand-accented by top NJ cake designers with all-white designs, vibrant color cut-outs of fondant or sugar paste, or the new hot color combination for 2012 wedding cakes: black and white.
Going Royal: The royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton put everything regal back on the map for wedding trends in 2012. Opulent designs with lots of piped white icing rosettes, ‘drapes,’ and painstaking lacy details give a sophisticated edge to a royal wedding cake look, whether it’s a modern-day royal wedding design or a lacey, finely-detailed wedding cake from Marie Antoinette’s era. The effect is refined, detailed and princess-like.
Simplicity. A wedding cake frosted in smooth layers, looking like wrapped boxes and very minimally accented with cut-out sugar paste or piped-on icing pearls is a very big wedding cake trend for 2012. Budget weddings often call for less ornate wedding details, but this style of wedding cake looks more expensive than it is. In a single, solid color, this cake wows wedding guests for being a stunningly simple work of art.
Artistic: A number of New Jersey and New York wedding couples choose a wedding cake design filled with colorful, vibrant accents, swirls, sugar paste cutouts, in a whimsical and artistic flair. These complex, geometric cakes are eye-catching and unforgettable, the perfect end to a fine dining experience.
Nature-inspired: As a stylistic evolution of the green wedding, or eco-friendly wedding with an emphasis on nature, it’s become a trend for wedding cakes to show off more flowers, even sugar-paste leaves and actual branches. The colors of nature-inspired cakes are most often white, off-white or a muted golden shade to show off the pastel florals, and we’ve also seen some robin’s egg blue cakes in the wedding reception dessert roundup.
Flower accents: Whether they’re real or fashioned from fondant, sugar paste or marzipan, flowers remain a popular wedding cake accent. In 2012, wedding cakes will be decorated with more magnolias, peonies, tulips, ranunculus and especially blue orchids, while last year’s roses and daisies fade back a bit.
Cake Stand Design: Many creative brides and grooms plan lovely presentations for their wedding cakes, displaying them in their wedding reception venue with elevated stands or colorful blocks, even wood platforms and ornate pedestals displaying their cakes.
Wedding Cake Bars: Why choose just one wedding cake? A big trend for 2012 is to select one main wedding cake design for your cake-cutting ritual at your wedding reception, and then place that cake on a buffet table filled with an array of different, smaller wedding cakes in coordinating colors, but different flavors and fillings. Also on the cake bar: chocolate truffles, chocolate dipped strawberries, and other delectable desserts. Our finest NJ pastry chefs offer an array of top-trend wedding desserts that put the perfect finishing touch on your spectacular wedding reception.
Michael Mahle, Director of Communications, Pleasantdale Chateau
