Finding Inspiration for Your Wedding Cake Design

Some brides will start planning their weddings from the age of five and will know exactly what they want on the day, down to the very finest details. In equal measure, plenty of brides will find themselves with less than a year to go until the big day and no clear idea what type of wedding they want, let alone the finer details such as the dress and the cake.

As suppliers, we understand the pressures of trying to come up with ideas and finding new inspiration. It can be a struggle, especially when you want to stand out from the crowd and create something totally unique and personal.

So I’m sharing with you the inspirations behind three of my favourite cake designs, to hopefully help you to find inspiration places you may never have looked. And while you're here - why don't you look at the cake trends that have hit in 2017.

Bees and Blossoms

This cake was inspired by the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew where the wedding was to be held. We had recently gone to Kew to shoot some pictures of the cakes over the summer, and had fallen completely in love with the gardens around Cambridge Cottage within the grounds. They were full of vibrant and abundant flowers, and we were drawn to the way the bees busily threaded their way in and out, creating an idyllic English country garden scene. This small detail really inspired me in designing this cake so we made sure that the bees were prominently featured on the cake, zipping in and out of the randomly arranged flowers and blossoms. By looking for inspiration from not just the most obvious sources but also the subtle details, you can guarantee that the finished product will be more unique and original for you.

Jazz Age

For this design, I took my inspiration from the beautiful Claire Pettibone dress with lace detailing that the bride was wearing. I wanted to create a cake with a 1920s feel and the lace detailing and embossed beads dangling from each tier on the dress really evoked the ‘flapper’ dress effect. The separators between each tier allow the beads to hang freely as they would on the real dress. Dresses can often be one of the first things a bride will really set her heart on, and can be a great source of inspiration for lots of other elements of the wedding.

Enchanted Forest

I took inspiration for this cake from the beautiful silhouette fairy-tale illustrations by Jan Pienowski. I was always in love with the dark and gothic element of fairy tales as a child, and wanted to use fairy tales on a cake, but not in the obvious ‘Disney-fied’ way. Pienowski’s detailed black silhouette illustrations perfectly evoke the dark magical world of fairy tales, and I thought that this would work really well on a cake. The contrast of the black icing images against the ivory icing allowed me to incorporate fairy tales into my designs but with a more contemporary approach. If you have any favourite childhood stories these are a great source of inspiration for your wedding, and there is always a way of incorporating them without making the wedding seem childish or overly theme-based.