Wedding Cakes

You can safely assume that wedding cakes are not an area that I have specialist knowledge of or indeed any knowledge of. I thought I’d better have a quick look to check on what sort of price I’d be paying if I ever came across the need to buy one. I figured about £250. Apparently the average price in 2025 in the UK is £650. Which was a surprise as was the fact that wedding cakes have a bit of a history.

I could find references to specific wedding cakes rather than cakes used in a wedding or other rituals as far back as the Greeks in 2,500 BCE and Rome about 500CE. Throughout the Mediterranean, there were a number of different traditions involving the wedding cake. Romans used cakes made of wheat or barley, and a cake was broken over the bride's head as a symbol of her fertility.

breaking the cake on the bride's head

Also, the wedding party would stack the cakes, one on top of the other, as high as they could be stacked. The bride and bridegroom then had to kiss each other over the tower of cakes without knocking them over. If they were successful, the couple looked forward to a lifetime of prosperity. Among Greeks and Romans, the bride and bridegroom took several wedding cakes to the local temple or shrine and sacrificed them to the appropriate deity.

Back then cooks and bakers made their sweets and pastries without ingredients such as refined sugar and chocolate and without leavening agents like baking soda and baking powder. First-century cakes were much more like flat cheese cakes or modern fruitcakes, using dried fruits like dates and apricots and honey or fruit syrup as the sweetener, or like raisin bread, small pieces of dried fruit added to standard bread recipes.

a first century wedding cake

These traditions followed the Romans when they invaded Britain in 43CE and over the centuries developed towards what we know today. But not entirely what we know today. 

Food historian Sam Bilton explored the origins of this symbolic wedding day treat:

During the 16th and 17th centuries it was bride pies rather than cakes that were most popular at wedding feasts. Some recipes, like Thomas Dawson’s Tarte that is a courage to a man or woman from 1596/7, included ingredients like sweet potatoes and cock sparrow brains, both of which were believed to have aphrodisiac properties.

Other bride pies were far more elaborate. Robert May’s 1685 recipe was in fact one large tart containing several distinct pies. Fillings included egg and dried fruit (rather like mincemeat); prawns, cockles and oysters; cocks’ combs and lambs’ testicles; artichokes and stuffed larks. The pièce de résistance was a central compartment filled with live birds or a snake, “which will seem strange to the beholders, which cut up the pie at the Table. This is only for a Wedding to pass away the time”. Recipes for bride pies were still appearing in the 18th century although their fillings were more likely to resemble a minced pie than the exotic ingredients of earlier centuries.

section of a medieval wedding cake

One of the earliest recipes for cake definitely linked to weddings appeared in the Compleat Cook by Rebecca Price (1655). It was called The Countess of Rutland's Receipt for making the rare Banbury Cake which was apparently highly praised at her daughter’s (the Right Honourable the Lady Chaworth’s) wedding. As well as currants and spices such as nutmeg, the cake was scented with musk, and even ambergris – whale vomit to you and me.

Gradually, enriched yeast cakes made way for ‘plum cakes’, known as fruit cakes today. It was common for such cakes to be glazed with a sugar icing. The whiter your icing, the better and more expensive the sugar. It was Elizabeth Raffald (1769) who first suggested icing a bride cake with almond paste and sugar icing. Although bride cakes were iced in the 18th century, fancy embellishments were only included in later years.

By the 19th century, the wedding cake would have looked completely unrecognisable to its 16th-century originators and much more like today’s cake. Which is about enough for me.

the world's oldest extant wedding cake (1898)

The Bride-Cake

This day my Julia thou must make
For Mistresse Bride, the wedding Cake:
Knead but the Dow and it will be
To paste of Almonds turn’d by thee:
Or kisse it thou, but once or twice,
And for the Bride-Cake ther’l be Spice.

                                            Robert Herrick, 1648

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.