WEDDING CAKE
DESIGN & DECORATION
ARTISTIC WEDDING CAKES INDIVIDUALLY DESIGNED IN BUTTERCREAM & GANACHE
DESIGNED FOR YOUR WEDDING
A bespoke wedding cake starts with your wedding rather than a catalogue of designs. I take inspiration from the colours, textures and details you're bringing together for your day, then interpret them through my own style to create something individual to you.
That inspiration can come from almost anywhere — your flowers and stationery, the architecture of your venue, a piece of fabric or embroidery, the season, a favourite landscape or simply a collection of colours and images you love. You don't need to arrive with a finished cake design in mind.
From soft buttercream and sharp ganache finishes to hand-painting, texture, colour and seasonal flowers, we'll bring together the elements that suit both your wedding and the cake we're creating.
The aim isn't to reproduce somebody else's wedding cake.
It's to create one that feels as though it belongs at yours.
BUTTERCREAM OR GANACHE?
The finish of your wedding cake isn't just about how it looks. It also affects the texture, style and types of decoration we can create.
I primarily work with Italian meringue buttercream and chocolate ganache, choosing the finish that works best for your design, flavours and the time of year.
Italian meringue buttercream is beautifully smooth and silky, with a lighter sweetness than traditional buttercream. It can be finished softly or smoothly, textured, coloured and hand-painted, making it incredibly versatile for wedding cakes.
Chocolate ganache creates a firmer finish and is particularly suited to crisp edges, deeper colours and more structured or sculptural designs. It can also be textured, painted and finished with metallic details.
We don't need to choose a finish simply because it's fashionable — we'll use what works best for the cake we're creating.
DIFFERENT WAYS TO FINISH YOUR CAKE
The finish of a cake can completely change its character, from softly textured and organic to beautifully smooth and precise. These finishes can then become the backdrop for painting, flowers, colour and other decorative details.
SOFT &
TEXTURED
Buttercream and ganache don't have to be perfectly smooth. Softly textured, palette-applied and deliberately imperfect finishes can give a cake a relaxed, organic feel and work beautifully with natural and floral designs.
SMOOTH
& REFINED
For a cleaner look, buttercream or ganache can be finished smoothly, creating a beautifully simple backdrop for flowers, painted details, piping, colour or more minimal decoration. The top edge can be kept crisp and defined or given a softer, more natural finish depending on the overall design.
SEMI-NAKED
For a more rustic finish, a thin layer of buttercream can allow some of the cake beneath to show through while still giving the sponge some protection.
- I no longer offer fully naked cakes. Leaving the sides of a wedding cake completely exposed makes the sponge more vulnerable to drying out and offers less protection when a cake is displayed for several hours, particularly during warmer weather.
YOUR CAKE IS A CANVAS
Once we've chosen the right finish, we can start building the design itself. Buttercream and ganache give me a wonderfully versatile surface to work with, whether your style is soft and romantic, colourful and botanical, understated and elegant or something a little more dramatic.
Colour can be layered and blended, surfaces can be painted or textured, and details can be added through piping, metallic finishes, flowers and other botanical elements. These techniques don't have to be used in isolation either — some of my favourite designs bring several of them together.
This is where the details of your wedding can begin to find their way onto your cake.
PALETTE-PAINTED WEDDING CAKES
Painting with buttercream and palette knives has become one of the most distinctive parts of my work. Rather than simply decorating the surface, I build colour and texture directly onto the cake, creating designs that can feel almost sculptural.
The technique can be used to create raised botanical details and flowers, loose painterly textures, or more abstract designs inspired by the Cornish coast, landscape and natural world. It can be bold and colourful or much softer and more subtle, and can be combined with real flowers and other decorative elements.
No two painted cakes are quite the same
— the design develops by hand as I work across the surface.
COLOUR & METALLICS
Colour can completely change the character of a wedding cake, from soft natural tones and delicate washes to rich, dramatic shades. I can take colours from your flowers, stationery or wider wedding palette, using them across the cake and adding metallic details where they suit the design.
PIPED &
SCULPTURAL DETAILS
Buttercream and ganache can also be used to create decoration with shape and dimension, from simple piped details to more sculptural forms. These can be used subtly or become a major part of the design, adding movement, depth and texture to the finished cake.
INSPIRED BY YOUR WEDDING
Your cake doesn't need to exist separately from the rest of your wedding. Some of the most individual designs begin with details that were never intended for a cake at all.
I can take inspiration from your flowers, stationery, fabrics, venue, colour palette, landscape or the season, picking out particular colours, shapes, textures or motifs and translating them into cake.
That might mean turning the flowers from your invitations into palette-painted details, taking colours and textures from your floristry, using the Cornish landscape around your venue as inspiration for an abstract painted finish, or picking up a tiny detail from a dress, piece of embroidery or decoration.
You don't need everything to match exactly. Often it's the subtler connections that make a cake feel as though it genuinely belongs within the wedding.
Think of your wedding as the inspiration, rather than something the cake needs to copy.
YOU DON'T NEED TO KNOW
EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANT
Some couples come to me with a very clear idea of how they'd like their cake to look. Others know their colours, flowers or general wedding style but have absolutely no idea what to do with the cake. Both are completely fine.
You don't need to design your wedding cake before you enquire. That's part of the bespoke process. In fact, it's one of the reasons I usually save your full design consultation until around six months before the wedding. By then, you've had time to develop the look and feel of your day — your venue, floristry, stationery, colours and all those little details that can give us inspiration for the cake.
We'll use what you've already planned as our starting point. Sometimes a single detail — a flower, a colour, a piece of stationery or even the landscape around your venue — is enough to set the whole design in motion.
Your job is to plan your wedding. You don't also need to become a wedding cake designer.
LET'S CREATE SOMETHING YOUR OWN
Your wedding cake should feel like part of your wedding — whether that's soft and romantic, colourful and botanical, inspired by the Cornish landscape or something entirely different.
If you're planning a wedding in Cornwall and would like to create a bespoke cake together, you can find out more about tastings, consultations and how to book below.