WEDDING CAKES

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 68, 11 June 1927, Page 14

WEDDING CAKES

THE MODERN TREND CONFECTIONERY SCULPTURES Even the wedding cake with its immemorial traditions, is being affected by modern ideas. People are no longer content with the old iced and beflowered cake, whether in one tier or three,” said a representative of Messrs. Lyons, London, recently. “They come to us with the most astonishing requests and instructions, and tl?e whole art of wedding-cake architecture is being changed. “As a result, the decoration of the bridal cake is becoming more difficult than ever, and some of our confectioners may almost be described as sculptors in sugar-icing.” Of the latest forms of the weddingcake, one took the shape of a female figure seated upon a globe and holding aloft an airplane. On the wings of the machine innumerable little Cupids were sitting. Another cake was modelled like a church, with a ches and pinnacles and Cupids in the place of more sacred statues. In the centre, beneath the meeting arches, a larger Cupid, standing at an anvil, forged two gold rings into a link.

Tiny flowers surrounded, the sugarwalls of the church, which was entered by means of green “marble” steps. Above, a belfry enclosed a chime of silver bells. Side by side with these up-to-date affairs were grouped examples of the earliest wedding-cakes known to history. One was a plain wheaten loaf, baked in the form of a wheatsheaf and gilded. This was the Roman bridecake.

In Chaucer’s times the wedding feast was graced by a whole-meal loaf-cake, sweetened with honey, sugar not then having been introduced into England. The earliest English wedding-cake was a confection of aromatic ingredients, roughly smeared with icing sugar, into which were stuck bitter almonds. The sugar and the almonds together symbolised the mingled pleasure and pain incidental to the married state!