With Easter behind us, Gerhard Jenner welcomes the advent of the wedding cake season and the challenges it entails

You need to read this with the sombre tones of Sir David Attenborough’s voice in mind: Spring is upon us and the sap is rising. Pastures are green and transforming the environment. Flowers are in full bloom everywhere and setting the scene for one of nature’s most amazing annual displays: the wedding season.

Yes, as soon as the last chocolate Easter egg has flown off the shelves, the wedding season is indeed upon us. This means creating delightful sweetmeats for many wedding breakfasts to come.

Early birds have been setting up appointments with our cake hotline for some time. Only when it comes to older couples, second marriages or a few liberal types does the groom come into play at this stage. Normally this is the domain of the bride and her still-watchful mother.

The options

At our wedding cake appointments, we present the customers with a choice of four different sponges; fruitcake is very rarely requested these days. This year we added a delicious Layered Noisette cake to the repertoire.

It is moist and mouth-wateringly delicious and happens to be wheat-free too, a request we get more and more of late. Its texture has the advantage of making it ideal for stacking into tiers or to withstand travelling to romantic wedding venues up and down the land.

One of our most popular standard cakes is covered in streams of dark and white chocolate. It’s a great one for chocolate-lovers, but not so good if it’s the hottest day of the summer and the delivery gets stuck in a motorway traffic jam heading for the Shires.

A great many of our cakes are covered in marzipan, which we believe to be preferable in taste over sugarpaste fondant. Tastes, of course, differ and covering a cake in sugarpaste fondant does make travelling with a cake a great deal easier.

We have many loyal fans for our cakes. Naturally, they don’t want to miss them on their wedding day, even if it means lugging them as hand-luggage to India. This is why we will be adding this ‘travelling safe’ option to our wedding cake finishes this year.

Bespoke experience

We tend to get a lot of wedding cake customers looking for a truly bespoke experience. Their wedding cake design might be based on a romantic first date in a park or a visit to an art exhibition in a gallery. This year, we’ve had a wedding appointment for a cake based on a Kandinsky painting, and the Monet exhibition at Tate Modern has influenced our own cake designs and colours for this summer.

I recall a wedding cake some time ago that featured several weeping willows and even included several rare waterfowl. I just hope I haven’t ruffled too many feathers liking man to animal. Happy wedding cake season!

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