Picture the scene: it’s midsummer, a bucolic wedding is mid-flow, the bride is radiant, the groom pristine. They stand above their guests in a doorway while caterers ascend the stone staircase carrying the ceremonial wedding cake. But wait! One of the caterers is wobbling! The cake is slipping! The caterer reaches for it but it falls from his hands and tumbles to the ground: splat. A dog appears from nowhere and begins to eat the crumbs. And all of it, every excruciating moment, is captured on camera.
Is this one of my night terrors? Well, yes, but it was also the wedding of Anna Boden – the eldest daughter of Boden clothing founder Johnnie – to her now husband Oliver last week. Johnnie took to Instagram to post photos of the day including a blow-by-blow pictorial account of the cake catastrophe. As a former wedding caterer and wedding cake maker, when the images popped up on my Instagram feed, my stomach dropped faster than the cake.
Because, of course, a dropped wedding cake is a cake maker’s worst nightmare. Wedding cakes are no ordinary cakes: a lot more rides on them than a Colin the Caterpillar. I have spent many hours baking, decorating, erecting, moving, and slicing wedding cakes – but I’ve spent even longer worrying about them. The logistics of stacking and moving a wedding cake are complex, not to mention leaving it unattended around party-goers for a prolonged period of time. Will it melt? Will it slide? Will it get knocked? In the days that followed Johnnie’s Instagram post, I thought about the Boden cake – and those poor caterers – a lot.
So, imagine my surprise when it turned out that the whole thing was a ruse! A set-up! Johnnie put out a statement days later: the cake drop was a prank. ‘Every minute was rehearsed to within an inch of its life,’ he wrote. The ‘caterers’ were actors, who burst into song as soon as the cake was dropped. More fool me! And more fool all the wedding guests. The wedding party was in on it; it was just entertainment to shock and amuse guests. Perhaps I’m a fun sponge but I’m left wondering why. It’s your wedding day, not a variety show. Doesn’t it cheapen the whole ceremony if you turn it into an entry for You’ve Been Framed?
But there’s clearly an appetite for this form of nuptial entertainment. There are countless companies offering ‘comedy waiters’ for weddings, who give appallingly bad service, bicker in front of guests, shout, rant, pocket cutlery – and drop cakes. Other scenarios are possible: undercover guests, surprise policemen and falling waiters, all of whom cause a fuss, then eventually reveal themselves by bursting into song.
Doesn’t it cheapen the whole ceremony if you turn it into an entry for You’ve Been Framed?
Most wedding planning is about trying to prevent things going wrong on the day – so what’s the appeal in deliberately sticking a spanner in the works? You could just book a singer. I get it: it’s supposed to be transgressive. On a day that is governed by tradition, scheduled to within an inch of its life, what could be more subversive than a deliberate disruption? But if it’s so common that multiple agencies exist offering disruptions, it ceases to be anti-establishment and just becomes… naff.
Like everything else, weddings are at the mercy of trends and nowhere is this more apparent than in what we eat during them. Do you remember when miniature burgers, miniature fish and chips, and miniature shepherd’s pies were all the rage as canapés? Or when every wedding you attended had Pimm’s or aperol spritzes, or a street food truck on stand-by? The wedding cake is no exception: fruit cakes are (mostly) a thing of the past. The early noughties preferred towers of extravagantly buttercreamed cupcakes in every colour of the rainbow. For at least a decade, naked wedding cakes reigned supreme, covered in fresh flowers. But wedding cakes designed to be dropped? That’s a new one.
Charlie Baker has recently flown the flag in this magazine for more old-fashioned weddings. I’m broadly with him. I don’t think traditions should be maintained if they cease to resonate. At my own wedding almost a decade ago, I had no interest in being given away or taking my husband’s name and – can you believe it? – women gave speeches at our reception.
Of course I understand the urge to make your wedding memorable. I was certain that our music choices (the Detectorists theme tune followed by Paul Simon’s ‘You Can Call Me Al’), our table names (famous couples) and the fact that my dress was slightly off-white were all deeply original. We stewed over these choices for months, convinced that no one had ever organised a wedding that so clearly communicated the personalities of the bride and groom. With the tiniest bit of hindsight, I can see we didn’t exactly break the mold. Now, I’m extremely glad of that.
If you’re going to get a bunch of people together, wear a white-ish dress and legally bind yourself to someone else, it’s mad to suggest that you’re subverting anything. Grasping at novelty feels out of place and try-hard at a big, fat wedding. I say, when it comes to wedding stunts, just drop it
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