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Wedding Cakes: Deciding on the Edible Art that Dresses Your Wedding Reception

The wedding cake is the centerpiece of the wedding reception. It is a work of art created specifically to your specifications as a representation of the hope that you have for your new life together. At the same time, the wedding cake often serves as a desert to symbolically allow each guest to enjoy the sweet savor of your new marriage.

The search for a bakery need not be an arduous task, but neither should it be put off until the last moment. Like other wedding professionals, the more skilled the cake decorator is, the more likely they are to book up leaving you to the unpleasant task of discovering a new talent or settling for second best.

Your selection of a bakery to produce your wedding cake begins with you and your future spouse. It begins with your decision about what is important to you. Is the taste of your wedding cake more important or is the appearance more important? Is the wedding cake going to be the only food served, or is it going to be just one of many deserts?

If appearance is most important in your wedding cake choice, and if money is not an object, you might want to choose a cake decorated with fondant icing to grace your wedding cake. Fondant gives the wedding cake a luxuriously smooth finish and allows the cake decorator to create designs that no other icing allows. The problem with fondant, however, is that it can cost as much as 30 % more than buttercream icing and most do not enjoy the taste, which could mean that most of your wedding cake will be left uneaten.

If taste is important to you in your wedding cake choice, then you probably want a buttercream icing. It tastes much better than fondant and while it will not get as smooth as fondant, it can still look stunning! Know, however, that many if not most bakeries make their buttercream icing with shortening. Unless you want your wedding cake to leave a greasy aftertaste make sure that the bakery you choose uses butter, which will produce a nice ivory colored icing, or a product called white margarine. White margarine is a little difficult to obtain but it will stand up nearly as well as shortening and will taste much better.

One final note. Many bakeries will tell you that white margarine will not hold up to the demands of wedding cake design. This is simply not true in the dry summer heat of the west. Perhaps it is in the humidity of the eastern half of the state, I don't know. As a matter of fact, I even had one such wedding cake that stood up to one hundred three degree temperatures for more than three hours before the wedding party got to it. Now those are extremes that I always try to advise my clients away from, but done right buttercream icing made with white margarine holds up just fine.

Jeanette Shinn is the founder, operator, and edible design artist behind Layer By Layer, http://www.frostingonthecake.com, a special order bakery serving weddings and other special occasion needs of the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area. Jeanette is also the co-owner of Your Wedding Cake and Favors http://www.wedding-cakes-portal.com a website dedicated to helping brides realize their wedding day dreams with advice and resources for the entire wedding experience.