[Updated 24/11/2023]

"Bespoke" is probably one of the most popular buzz words in the wedding world's lexicon, from bespoke dresses and suits to bespoke stationery, and certainly bespoke cakes. According to the Oxford book of words bespoke is an adjective that means "made to order" but how does that translate to our wedding cakes?

Literally, that. We bake to your order. Of course you can pick one of our popular designs which we can personalize and alter to suit your wedding day's colour palette, and we can also get our baker-brain-cells storming if you have more to your bespoke brief.

We often get asked what the bespoke wedding cake design process entails which prompted me to publish a detailed step-by-step guide to make it super easy!

Essential Wedding Cake Details

There are a few very important details we need before we can start the fun part. These details are:

Ensuring a Memorable Wedding Date

This is probably THE most important detail of all as we need to be certain we have the capacity to bake and create your bespoke wedding cake and are available to deliver for your date. While we do take bookings up to a year in advance and the most popular wedding dates have traditionally been in the summer months we are increasingly seeing more weddings taking place throughout the year causing some weekends to be fully booked when we least expect it!

Navigating Cake Delivery Logistics

Unlike our other products such as macaron towers, gifts and hampers that are safely delivered across the UK via trusty Royal Mail postal services, all our cake products including cupcakes, wedding cakes, mini cakes, can only be hand-delivered by a careful driver. We offer very competitive rates on wedding cake delivery within London but can also deliver wedding cakes to surrounding home-counties such as Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent, Surrey, and Sussex and further afield such as Somerset and Devon subject to delivery quotations and minimum order quantities. Of course, we will be happy to travel even further to the Midlands and the North but the delivery cost is far greater and you may find it better value to find a more local supplier. 

Approximate Guest Count

Having an approximate headcount helps decide the ideal size of your cake as a starting point for the design.

Choosing the Perfect Wedding Cake Size

Now that we've established that we are free for your date and can deliver to your venue the fun stuff can start! Having your approximate guest count helps us with a starting point by deciding on the all-important size. In general, most brides and grooms will choose our three or four-tiered cakes for the average wedding reception size of 80-120 guests, but we also offer two-tiered wedding cakes that are perfect for intimate weddings. However that is not to say that if you are having a smaller wedding and you have been dreaming of having a three-tiered cake that you shouldn't go for one should your budget allow!

Other cake makers may offer dummy tiers to add height and drama however we will only ever work with real cake as it makes no real difference to our cost and we have NEVER heard of too much cake at a wedding! With our cakes tasting great for up to 5 days (when stored carefully of course) any extra cake makes for a great wedding favour especially when boxed in beautiful wedding cake slice boxes. Once we have decided on the size we have a starting price to work from.

Drawing Inspiration for Your Wedding Cake Design

This is where we get to know a bit more about your own ideas and visions of how you want your wedding day to look as a couple. If you have a clear idea please feel free to send across your mood board and specifications to us! If not, don't worry - we LOVE brain-storming and designing wedding cakes with our couples! A few things to think about and get inspired by while designing the cake are:

Expressing Your Style Through Colour Palette

This is probably where most couples will draw most of their inspiration from. Whether it's Pantone's colours of the year or bright rainbows we can bring your colours to cake-life through the buttercream and glaze and decorations such as piped buttercream flowers, macarons and chocolate.

While we can work with any colours in the spectrum we do advice limiting the use of really bright block colours such as red and blue and strongly advice against the use of too much black. This is because not only do these colours require a LOT of food colouring for the desired aesthetic effect they also proven to be less appetizing than softer colours. Should you have these strong colours in your colour palette we can always introduce them through decorations such as macarons, marshmallows, candied popcorn, piped buttercream roses and sprinkles to tie the cake in with your wedding day's look.

Overall Themes and Styling

Whether your desired wedding day look is based on modern metallics, winter wonderland, city chic, vintage or rustic, we can design a cake to suit!  

Venue Style

Sometimes it's a lot easier to go with the flow of your chosen venue's style. Is your wedding venue a rustic barn or pub full of character with exposed beams, brick work etc?

Or is it an opulent palatial venue with lots of glitz and glam? We can get inspired and create a cake with stripped semi-naked buttercream to fit in with a relaxed atmosphere or bejewel it to the nines with real gold and silver leaf gilding and embellishments to make Marie Antoinette proud.

By all means, feel free to send us a link to your Pinterest board and images however please bear in mind that any respectful cake maker will only use the images for inspiration and would never copy the design, and we firmly fall into that category. Copying someone else's design is a real buzz kill (and looked down upon in the industry) and most good wedding cake makers have a signature style which they would adapt to create your bespoke cake. Our style is well represented within our website so please feel free to have a browse and pick off elements you like and send across to us for more brain-storming fodder! After all, we hope you are choosing us because you already like what you see and want us to help make a cake your own.

Exploring Delectable Wedding Cake Flavours

Once we have the design elements sorted we can build on them with our flavours!

Cake Sponge

We offer three choices of cake sponge flavours - vanilla bean, chocolate mud and red velvet (no fruit cake here sorry). Most couples like to go for a different flavour for each tier starting with their favourite for the biggest tier. We can also create gluten free versions of all three but as they are produced in the same premises as other products containing gluten we cannot guarantee there will be no traces. 

Buttercream

We have a HUGE catalogue of flavours such as chocolate, cookies & cream, Nutella, Peanut Butter, raspberry, lemon to name a few, but the most popular choices are vanilla (as we can colour it in any colour from romantic pastels, to trendy ombre, to bright rainbow) and salted caramel (because it is the best thing on the planet). We can have a different flavour per tier to complement the sponge flavour and we have plenty of experience in suggesting winning combinations (e.g.: lemon and red velvet is gross together so we'll advise against that, and chocolate and salted caramel is the best pairing on the planet so we'll always root for that). 

The Delightful Wedding Cake Consultation Experience

Now that we've extensively talked about the design of your bespoke wedding cake you may like to taste a sample or view an example or mock-up. To offer the great value that we do unfortunately this is the one thing that we cannot do for free and is a charged-for service that is non-refundable and non-redeemable. You can always taste a smaller cake in advance of the big day by ordering a birthday cake online or popping into Selfridges Food Hall on Oxford Street to pick up a mini-cake or two. Regarding seeing a mock-up before the big day, we can quote for this depending on the brief however one of the best parts of your wedding day will undoubtedly be sharing the surprise of seeing our bespoke wedding cake design in real-life as a newly-wedded couple and cutting into it together!

Each couple is unique in their tastes and preferences but what they all have in common is that they want their wedding day to be perfect and the best day of their lives and we love being able to contribute towards that. I hope this has helped with understanding our bespoke wedding cake design process and we look forward to hearing from you about your big day plans.

Lots of wedding cake lovin',

Reshmi xoxo