Literally Literary Wedding Cakes

I've writen about naked and semi-naked cakes recently, but my real love is for iced cakes. Once a cake is iced, you can do almost anything with it, decoration-wise, as the icing can take all sorts of pimping! One of my favourite quirky ideas is my 'book club' cake.

I first made this cake for Michelle and Graham in 2013. They had met through an on-line book club, and they came to me with the idea of a pile of penguin classics. I grabbed some books from the bookshelf to try and demonstrate how we might stack them. Graham said that most of the books I'd (randomly) grabbed were books they'd have on their cake. And that was the exact moment I fell in love with these two!! The link above is well worth a look, not least because their photographer was awesome Assassynation.

Since then, I've made this cake so many times. Every time is different. Two things stay the same:

(1) I'm told that all the guests wondered why there was a pile of books on the table, not realising that they'd be eating them later!

(2) Someone, somewhere, will see the cake and ask me if the couple get to choose the books. Yes. Yes they do. It would be some kind of weird cake maker that met a couple once and then made sweeping generalisations about which books they'd want!! I'd never have got to ecclectic lists such as Noam Chomsky / Black Beauty or The Very Hungry Caterpillar / Wuthering Heights!

The top book can be a 'real' book, or it can be something to summarise things, such as "The Next Chapter by Georgina and Daniel", or "A Day at The Zoo by Julia and Jeff", who were married at London Zoo.

Of course the books don't have to be penguin classics. They just lend themselves so well to making a fun cake as they are iconic, beautiful and - my favourite bit - brightly coloured! I can make them any colours though so you could have some more muted colours if you prefer. I believe that the aforementioned 'Very Hungry Caterpillar' is yet to be published as a penguin classic, but the campaign starts now.

Louisa and Sam sent me a lovely card after the wedding, and I think Louisa's words serve as a pretty ace review for this design. Lousia says, "What can I say? THE CAKE WAS AMAZING!!! Seriously, we had fairly high expectatoins but you completely blew us away! Your cake was the talking point of the whole wedding, people were wondering at it for days afterwards: it basically stole the show! Several people even confessed to me they thought it was a bit odd that we had a stack of books on the table - until we cut it...And I have to agree - we were marvelling at the level of detail: the way you had added individual pages, the way each spine wrapped around the books. Incredible!" 

If books are the way to your heart, then do get in touch. I WANT to hear from you!!