00:01I think your wedding cake should be the best cake that you've ever seen and that you're ever going to eat.
00:07For many, a wedding without a wedding cake is as unthinkable as a wedding without guests.
00:13So how do you make the perfect wedding cake? How does it become a work of art?
00:18And how much does something like this actually cost?
00:22We're in Oldham, North West England at The Frostery to meet an expert.
00:28Hi, my name is Suzanne and I'm a wedding cake designer and today we're going to make a wedding cake.
00:34The story of every wedding cake begins romantically with a consultation.
00:40The main point of the consultation is for me to kind of pull all this information out from them.
00:45Do they want something really quirky and fun that tells a story about them
00:49or do they want something that's really beautiful and exquisite and they'll kind of wow their guests in that way.
00:55Baking a wedding cake isn't exactly a one day affair.
00:59So when we create a wedding cake it's a three day process.
01:02So we bake the cake and then the following day we fill it, we ganache it and then we let it sit overnight so it's nice and firm for when we come to cover it in the sugar paste.
01:13So today we're making quite a special cake, this is actually a vegan cake.
01:17We don't make that many vegan wedding cakes.
01:19I've warmed up some sugar paste which I've coloured a pale ivory and I'm going to roll it out and stick it on top of the cake.
01:26But hang on, we should probably talk about how we got here.
01:31The wedding cake tradition began in ancient Rome where wheat or barley cake was broken over the bride's head for fertility and luck.
01:38In medieval England this evolved into a stack of sweet buns that couples kissed over for luck.
01:44In the 17th century savoury bride's pie became popular, current filled fruit cakes gradually replaced it.
01:51The Victorian era's refined sugar enabled white icing symbolising purity and wealth, famously popularised by Queen Victoria's wedding cake in 1840.
02:02Nowadays the typical British wedding cake is a tiered sponge cake with icing.
02:07Thanks Queen Victoria, back to today's cake.
02:14Suzanne smooths the icing for a more contemporary look.
02:18She levels the cake and inserts dowels to stabilise the different tiers before assembling the final cake.
02:28It's time to decorate.
02:30Suzanne adds an elaborate blue bow made of royal icing.
02:35So what I'm doing now is I have got a bag and there's some royal icing in here, but royal icing made with aquafiber instead of egg white because it's for vegan cake.
02:46And it's just a small piping tip and I'm going to pipe a row of pearls and that kind of gives a border to the design.
02:53Afterwards, Suzanne hand paints the cake.
02:59In all the years I've been making cakes, I've seen, especially wedding cakes, the trends have just changed.
03:11But I've always stayed true to the art of cake decorating because I love it, I really love doing it.
03:19There's amazing things you can do with royal icing.
03:23So what's a particularly British wedding tradition?
03:27Classically, a wedding cake was made with a rich fruit cake and they can last for years.
03:34So in Britain we have this tradition where couples will keep the top tier of the wedding cake for the christening of their first child.
03:42Or some couples prefer to keep it for their first anniversary.
03:47Traditions vary across Europe. In many regions of Hungary, the couple smashes their wedding cake, typically made of caramelized sugar and ground walnuts.
03:58The more shards there are, the more luck it's supposed to bring.
04:02In Ukraine, the couple feeds each other pieces of wedding cake called korovai sprinkled with salt.
04:09It's supposed to symbolize the different life phases the couple will go through and will hopefully be the last time they do something unkind or salty to one another.
04:18So how much do elaborate cakes like these cost?
04:21Typically speaking, a cake from us would cost from about £800 for a three tier cake.
04:28This kind of sixth tier would probably, with lots and lots of sugar flowers on it, would probably work out at about £4,500.
04:37Because there's so much work that goes into it and it's a big cake it would feed at least 500 people.
