Five reasons to choose a buttercream wedding cake
Your nana says to have a traditional wedding cake. She still has the yellowing silk flowers that adorned the top of her royal-iced cake in a travel sweet tin. A royal iced cake is hard to come by these days, so conventional folks opt for fondant. But this is changing. Buttercream is rapidly replacing fondant as a cake covering. Here’s why.
Elaborate floral wedding cake - all sculpted with buttercream by Emma Page Buttercream Cakes London
It will be cheaper. A fondant cake is crumb-coated in buttercream, chilled and covered in rolled sugarpaste, which then has to be smoothed and decorated with, say, sugar flowers - all hand-modelled from expensive flower paste, wired, dried and finished with paint or petal dust. A buttercream cake is also crumb-coated and chilled, but then frosted with a palette knife and, once scraped smooth, the decoration can be piped, painted on sculpted on pretty much straight away. The whole process is way quicker, which is why it’s cheaper.
Delicious Italian meringue buttercream, far less sweeter than American, or supermarket, buttercream. by Emma Page Buttercream Cakes London
2. It will taste better than a fondant cake. Let’s be honest, nobody eats the fondant covering on a cake. When I was cheffing at weddings, we’d have tons of the stuff left on plates to throw away. The buttercream I use is a lusciously smooth Italian meringue buttercream. It has a fraction of the sugar used in American buttercream, which is used on supermarket celebration cakes, and relies on a cooked meringue for its light-as-air volume. Italian meringue buttercream takes on flavours extremely well. Any extract: elderflower, champagne, lemon, orange rose, or of course vanilla, will really bring the flavour of your cake alive.
Buttercream flowers: not only edible but can be different flavours
3. You can eat all of it. Unless your buttercream wedding cake is dressed with fresh flowers, or some daft topper made out of clothes pegs or something, you can eat your whole cake. Sugar flowers are rock hard and inedible. They’re for putting in the box that someone gave you a coffee grinder in and stashing in the loft for you to discover and moon over when you pack to go into an old-people’s home. Buttercream flowers are soft and delicious.
A fun cake design can be inspired by a card, invitation or even a bag
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It will look fun. Even the most elaborately-piped buttercream confections have bags of character and never look boring. Piping is high-risk - once you’ve made a mark it’s not coming off - there’s nothing cautious or tentative about it, which is why buttercream cakes have a spirited style about them that you couldn’t achieve with fondant.
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Price Harry and Meghan’s buttercream wedding cake: elegant, stylish and delicious-looking.
It’s like well trendy. ALL the good cakes are buttercream. For example, Harry and Meghan, Elvis and Priscilla, Tom Daley and Dustin Lance have all chosen buttercream cakes for their big day. Say no more.