This Takes the (Wedding) Cake!

Somewhere along the blog trail, I stumbled across the Ethics Scorecard, which had posted a commentary of the use of fake wedding cakes. Since then, I've found that, what with June brides and all, fake cakes has been pretty widely covered recently. (Here's a link to a Business Week article.)

Personally, I don't give all that much thought to weddings. When I go to small, intimate ones (generally paid for by the couple themselves), I always think about how sweet and heartfelt they are, and how sensible it is not involve a cast of thousands in the "big day." When I go to big blow-outs (generally paid for by the bride's parents), I - like everyone else at my table - mentally estimates what the whole thing costs; exchange at least one remark about how the couple would have been better off with the cash; then drink my champagne and go ask the band to play "Going to the Chapel of Love" (the Dixie-Belles oldie). Now, my expectations of wedding cake are pretty low. In my experience, it's bland and white, and I personally never get enough of that over-sweet, Crisco and confectioner's sugar icing. Sometimes, the wedding cake is a pleasant surprise: chocolate or carrot cake, "real" butter cream frosting.

But mostly the wedding cake is about what's on the outside, not what's on the inside.

On the outside it can be layer upon layer of "traditional tacky" with the little plastic bride and groom (or, more recently bride-bride, groom-groom) on top. Or it can be a gorgeous work of art with frosting sculptures on them that look too good to eat.

And apparently some of them do, in fact, look too good to eat for the very reason that they're inedible. Truly inedible.

It seems that there's a growing demand for fake-cakes, as some people want the bee-yoo-tee-full, drop-dead good looking cake as a showpiece for the picture taking. But they don't want to pay for it. So they buy the bogus cake and serve up cheaper-faster-better (?) sheet cakes for the wedding guests. The cake is always carted out to the back room to be cut up anyway, so who knows and who cares that the picture-perfect cake is cardboard covered with frosting.

Rent the Cake of Your Dreams of East Aurora, NY, is one cake rental outfit.

Their pitch is simple:

More and more brides are seeking cost-effective ways to have the wedding of their dreams. A beautiful cake is always a part of the dream wedding, but can be cost prohibitive. Instead, brides can rent an elegant display cake for their cake table, and have their caterer serve a delicious (and less expensive) sheet cake. The caterer can whisk the display cake away, then cut and serve the sheet cake in the kitchen...When you Rent The Cake Of Your Dreams, you will receive a cake that looks identical to a traditional fondant cake at a fraction of the cost.

They also point out the advantages of a non-melting fake cake for an outdoor, summer wedding.

Just to give it that element of authenticity, the fake cake comes with a small real section - just enough for the married couple to do the ceremonial cake cutting, the feeding of the cake to your spouse, and - depending on what tradition you hail from - the smashing of the cake into your spouse's face. The real cake section must be very carefully marked. Slicing in to the yummy foam section could cause the whole thing to tumble, giving away the secret.

I "ran some numbers" on real vs. fake (info from the Rent the Cake site). Fake costs $30 to rent, plus $1.75 a slice for the real sheet cake. A comparable real cake would be $2.50 per slice, but that's for the "basics". The more ornate, the more costly. Still, it looks like for a 100 slice rental plus real sheet runs you $205, while  the basic would run you $250 for 100 people. You'd pay a little more for fancy, but still. The differential between real and fake is not that great. Is it so all-fired important to have a fancy cake on display?

The Ethical Scorecard calls the fake cakes "ethically reprehensible." Well, I wouldn't go that far, but I will say that  your wedding probably shouldn't be primarily about the pictures. And you don't want to be taking a piece of cardboard out of your freezer on your first anniversary and pretending to eat it. And then there's the fact that if your guests find out, they'll think it's ridiculous (and, by extension, that you're ridiculous).

But mostly you've got to ask yourself, who wants to start a marriage with the metaphor of something hollow and tasteless?

Surely no one would answer "I do" to this question.

That said, I've got to hand it to Cake of Your Dreams and Fun Cakes of Grandville, Michigan (which has its own cake rental spin out, and which was also mentioned in the B-Week article), and the other "bakers" that have jumped on the "need" for a couple to have a phony, show-off display that makes their wedding pictures look better.

What a vast, multi-faceted, and over-the-top economy ours is!