How to Choose Your Wedding Cake

By Angela Jiles

DexKnows Weddings

When choosing a wedding cake, it is important to know how many servings are desired as well as the general feel and look of the final design. Understand the process of choosing and ordering a cake for the big day with advice from a professional pastry chef in this video on wedding cakes.

Hello, I'm Angela Jiles with Blue Note Bakery in Austin, Texas and I'm going to help you decide on how to choose a wedding cake. The first thing you want to do is figure out how many people you want to serve. From there you go and you pick out designs styles. One of the things that people really kind of tend to go for, nowadays, is going for a little bit more of the funky designs instead of necessarily being the so traditional. So people are having a lot more fun and being more creative in their cake designs. I usually tell people you want to kind of choose something that's important to you, either choosing like a family pattern, like china pattern something that has some kind of meaning. I've had brides use broaches that were their great grandmother's and they incorporate that in to their cake design. Their grandmother's wedding dress, they've been bringing that down in to their wedding and we incorporate the design from the pattern on the dress, the lace work, things along those lines. Also very important is flavor choice. You need to pick something that you like, not necessarily the so traditional sticking with you know, vanilla and chocolate. That can get a little boring for your guests in a way because if they go to a lot of weddings, they're getting the same vanilla cake with vanilla icing with vanilla blah, blah, blah..It can get a little redundant. So I usually tell people go for something that you like, something that goes great with your menu, something that goes great with the time of year. For instance one of our popular flavors right now is the key lime cake. It's a vanilla cake with key lime mouse and blackberry jam. It's really nice, it's very refreshing and very light and something a little different. Another favorite is our toasted almond; crumble them up and then fold them in to the cake batter. So it's very fresh tasting very light and not too bitter. We also do fun flavors with chocolate. We have a chocolate orange, a chocolate pecan. We just developed a chocolate chipotle cake, we'll get a little bit of kick to it, it's real nice. If it's an outdoor wedding, having a mouse filling cake in this, in Texas heat is just a little rough. And so if it's going to be inside then that's no problem. You've got your air conditioning but if it's going to be outside in the summer time you've got to keep that in consideration because you don't want to get your guests ill by having something that can potentially be hazardous sitting out all day. Keep it fun. That's one of my main requests for brides, is keep it fun so that you're enjoying it and it's exactly what you want instead of what your mom wants or what your sister wants or something like that. Keep it personal and fun. I'm Angela Jiles with Blue Note Bakery in Austin, Texas and that's my advice on choosing a wedding cake.