Wedding Cake Alternatives

By Angela Jiles

DexKnows Weddings

Some great alternatives to a wedding cake include petit fours, cupcakes, small bites, cookies, brownies, doughnuts or a dessert bar. Include a nontraditional dessert at a wedding reception with advice from a professional pastry chef in this video on wedding cakes.

I'm Angie Jiles with Blue Note Bakery in Austin, Texas and here's some wedding cake alternatives. I would say, that there are so many options. I've had people come in and ask for petifores, small bites, little cookies. We did a wedding the other day, where it was sandwich cookies, that we made chocolate chip cookies with butter cream in between them. Ginger snaps with butter cream in between them, cake bars, S'mores. There are people who have had doughnuts stuck together to look like a wedding cake. There's French wedding cake which is called the Croquembouche, and it's cream puffs filled with custard, stuck together with caramelized sugar. And those are a real pain to do but they're really good and it's so different and so fun. I've heard of people doing ice cream bars, instead of doing a wedding cake, they'll do ice cream. Cupcakes are really popular right now, there's a big trend in cupcakes at the moment. We've actually done a cake that wasn't a cake. The bride came in and she goes, I don't like cake. She wanted chocolate chip cookies and Rice Krispie Treats but she wanted it to look like a cake. So we took rice crispy treats and made a cake, basically out of that, and then covered it in chocolate chip cookies. And stacked it up to look like a wedding cake, so something a little different. There are pies, people have wedding pies, cobblers, we had somebody actually come in and ask if we would do key lime pies. And you know, there are, you can do tarts, fruit tarts. People have been known to do candy bars, where they set up an assortment of jars and bowls full of candy. And their guests come in with bags or Chinese To Go boxes and just load them up with candy, instead of having a traditional cake. You can pretty much do whatever you want. So you know, if you met your fiance at say, the candy store or something like that. Then having the assortment of candy out, would have some kind of storytelling meaning for you, it could be a lot of fun, a conversation piece. I've had people with family who have been ethnic like Indian families and they have their own special desserts that are important to them. And they use those instead of a wedding cake because a wedding cake is an American thing, it's not necessarily for other cultures. So you can do just about anything. Those are my ideas for wedding cake alternatives, I'm Angie Jiles with Blue Note Bakery in Austin,Texas.