Gold, Buttercream & Watercolor: Get Inspired by This Year’s Most Popular Wedding Cake Trends

There are plenty of perks that come with working at a wedding magazine, but perhaps one of the sweetest advantages—especially for dessert addicts like me—is that twice a year, on the days we shoot our gorgeous cake and flower spreads, we get to indulge in massive amounts of locally-made wedding cake. (Yes, it’s as glorious as it sounds, even if by day’s end we’re all in sugar comas and sick to our stomachs.)

Cake is, after all, one of the major elements of a couple’s Big Day, and we want to make sure we’re offering up the very best suggestions our dear city has to offer. It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it.

While taste is certainly important (your cake tasting will be one of your most fun wedding tasks to cross off your list, after all!), we’re also focused on the designs of the cakes, which vary depending on the season and the trends for that year. For 2016, we’re seeing lots of pretty styles, as pictured nicely here in this Glamour roundup: Naked cakes are still going strong, metallics are big and many couples are asking for simple textured buttercream.

We chatted with Zoë Lukas of Fishtown’s Whipped Bakeshop to get her opinion on the year’s most popular trends and whether they’ve made an appearance here in Philly, and she agreed with Glamour‘s lineup. “With the popularity of more rustic-feeling venues (like Terrain in Glen Mills and The Horticulture Center in Philly’s Fairmount Park), tiered cakes with different buttercream textures are the most popular style we make right now,” she says. “We’ve seen metallic accents for some time now, too; gold has been huge this year, but I think we will be seeing more copper in the months to come.”

And while some of the trends haven’t quite caught on yet here in Philly, Lukas is thinking ahead. “I have actually been working on some geode and agate designs for Whipped; while I haven’t had any requests for them yet, they are very popular with cake designers and I see them popping up all over the place,” she says. (Get a load of this one.) “Hand-painted cakes are another very popular trend, and it’s one of my favorites. I was a painter long before I started making cakes, so this one holds a special place in my heart!”

Watercolor cake by Fishtown’s Whipped Bakeshop.

We can hardly choose a favorite look, but Lukas’s two stunning cakes pictured here are making a pretty good case for hand painting. Will you go with one of these trends for your wedding cake?

RELATED: Spring Wedding Inspo: Cakes & Flowers In Every Shade of the Rainbow

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