Grooms in Cornwall and Devon

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Grooms Column: Cakes

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Craving a cake less ordinary? Nathan Midgley discovers the portal of his sweetest fantasies...

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Craving a cake less ordinary? Nathan Midgley discovers the portal of his sweetest fantasies...

If the online pinboard Pinterest is good for nothing else - and I am reasonably certain that it isn't - it is brilliant for looking at wedding cakes. Brilliant. Cakes made up as Gustav Klimt's The Kiss? Check. Cakes with H.P. Lovecraft monster Chthulu bursting out of the side? Check. Cakes made of macaroons, meringue or cereal? Check, check and check.

Checks, too, for art deco, steampunk (twice) and goth. Checks for The Simpsons, Futurama and Batman. This is one page, and it has broader cultural horizons than some human beings I know. So thronged is it that the pinner has given up on captions halfway down and started just writing 'cake', which under the circumstances seems redundant.



Browsing for cake is perhaps not the manliest of pursuits. I have an excuse to hand: lay the blame on PFC Auctions, who are selling off a slice of Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh's four-tier tower. The papers are running archive pictures. Nine feet in height, 500 pounds in weight, and astonishingly baroque. The Duke - then Prince Mountbatten - cut it with his sword. His sword. One look at that sent me scurrying for inspiration. (Bidding stands at £161 as I write, even though it probably isn't very fresh at 65 years old.)

Looking up trends was no good. I learnt that "Britain's top wedding cake maker says brides want the 'Great Gatsby' look" - a nod to the upcoming film. Evidence for this? Not much, other than that our hero has "already created several beautiful cakes for brides featuring Gatsby-influenced art deco motifs."

This is the thing with trendspotters: the trends they spot tend to involve stuff they get paid for. In any case, the Gatsby film stars baby-faced lothario Leonardo DiCaprio, and I want at least 20 degrees of separation between him and anything I eat on my wedding day. Actually, ever.

So I ended up on Pinterest. (Yes, Gatsby nerds, I was 'borne back' there. A boat against the current. Go buy an island for yourselves.) In the end it was genuinely useful - not because one cake struck a chord, but because of the sheer, lunatic variety on display. It was the opposite of trendspotting. If the Cake Dictator was one voice shouting "Art deco, old sport!" Pinterest was a sort of bonkers community choir, singing that we should pick something we love, track down a maverick baker and damn the rest.

That strikes me as a pretty good message. Now only one thing seems to matter: whatever shape the cake is, I want to cut it with a sword.

words Nathan Midgley


Copyright WED magazine 2013