As a wedding photographer, I have a bird’s eye view of lots of different weddings.  But no matter how many I see, there are traditions that turn up at all of them.  So, being the curious sort that I am, I decided to do a little research and write an occasional post on the history of some of the more prevalent wedding customs.  In the process, I’ll pull photos from some of the different wedding versions I’ve shot to give you an idea of the range out there.

I’m going to start with one of my favs – the wedding cake.  Beyond just liking cake (who doesn’t?) I love to photograph them.  If you get the light right on them, they’re truly beautiful to capture.  But I’m pretty sure they’re not there for my benefit.  So why do we have them at all these weddings?

Well, from what I’ve found, the history of the wedding cake is decidedly messy, I mean, for real messy.  The Romans used to bake a loaf of barley bread for the groom to break over the bride’s head.  Charming.  Supposedly, this represented the breaking of the hymen (doubly charming) and the dominion of the husband over the wife (that’s a triple!).  Fortunately, history saw fit to move on from there.  In Medieval times, they did a couple of good things, in my opinion.  They dropped the part where the bride gets whacked over the head by her new he-man of a husband and they added sugar to the bread (really good move).  Guests would come to the wedding bearing small sweet cakes or rolls and pile them as high as they could.  The couple would then try to lean over the piled cakes to kiss without toppling them.  If they managed that they would live long and prosper.  No one seemed to know what would happen if they knocked them all down.  I’m guessing plague, locust and maybe raining frogs, but it’s just a guess.  Another cool Medieval tradition included cutting the cake into very small pieces and throwing it over the shoulders of the bride and groom (I told you it was messy).  The guests would then dive for the small bits and presumably eat them off the floor.  If they managed to get a crumb of cake they would, you guessed it, live long and prosper.  Another version of that has the bride passing small bits of cake through her ring to all her guests.  Bad idea for a big wedding.

For the wedding cake as we know it, you have to skip forward to the 17th century.  The English and the French both claim to have made the first tiered, iced and decorated one (of course they do), but somewhere in that time a nasty concoction called the Bride’s Pie (think lots of organ meats in dough) wisely evolved into a version of the cake we see today.  By the time Queen Victoria got married in 1840, the custom was so entrenched she had a cake that measured 9.5 feet in diameter.  That’s a big cake and the term royal icing comes from there.  Many people believe the cake topper also came from Victoria and Albert’s cake.  They didn’t have a replica of themselves, but they did have little turtle doves and cupids and stuff.  Got people to thinking.  There’s also a story that sounds so made up I dare repeat it, about a baker making little dolls of his daughter and her fiance for the top of their wedding cake.  But who knows.  What we do know is they were wildly popular during the middle part of the 20th century and have been making a bit of a comeback.  Who doesn’t love a good cake topper?

The traditional white icing was at first a practical consideration.  It was hard enough to make smooth icing back then – some sources mention stirring for 2 hours – much less dye it.  In addition, it supported the Victorian idea of purity.  But while sugar was widely available, refined sugar not so much.  So only the rich people had it.  As a result, the whiter the cake, the more affluent the family.

The groom’s cake came about around the same time, but looked quite different than it does today.  It was basically a fruit cake (I know, yuck) that was cut into pieces and given to guests as a take home gift – kind of like those little bags of Krispy Kremes.  It was also the cake young girls put under their pillows so they would dream about their future husbands.

If you know other things regarding the history of the wedding cake you’d like to add, just put it in the comments section.  But I’ll just close by saying this is one tradition I approve of 100%.