13 Jaw-Dropping Wedding Cake Design Ideas (2024)

I planned my wedding at home in three months (while three months pregnant)! The venue, my mother-in-law’s backyard in rural New Jersey, was almost two hours outside of the city. When it came to the wedding cake, I knew that I wanted to keep the design as simple as possible. I called a local bakery and asked them to build a classic, minimal wedding cake and to ice it white. The day of, my florist decorated the cake—a single dahlia as an homage to the single dahlia with which my bridesmaids walked down the aisle, cedar from the trailing cedar bouquet I requested to mirror my mother’s bridal bouquet, and dainty roses, cute lisianthus, local ranunculus, all in season. In planning a wedding in three months and keeping it easy—for better or worse—I didn’t go down the wedding cake hole from which I am just now slowly emerging.

In seeking out extravagance in wedding cake design, I’ve learned that wedding cakes aren’t always real or edible cake; and that they can look like tables or can be made of jelly. I’ve encountered cakes that spit candy out at brides like piñatas, and I’ve seen the beauty in dollhouse cakes, cream puff towers, and Frankenstein cakes alike. Now I know that boba straws and dowels hold up traditional wedding cakes structurally, and that this can possibly be avoided by building wide tiers rather than tall ones. I serendipitously met Chloë Sevigny at a gala that I wasn’t really invited to and promptly asked about her wedding cake after interviewing the baker on this very subject just a few days prior. I spent more time than I’d like to admit reading about birds in wedding symbolism, focusing on the Audubon Society list of birds that mate for life. (This list includes but is not limited to swans, puffins, and vultures.)

I’m left with the realization that a wedding cake can be used to convey glamor, irony, sustainable value systems or irreverent ones, and that sometimes these categories are not mutually exclusive. The icing on the cake? I’ve come around from doubting my decision to leave my own wedding cake in the hands of the florist to realizing that I am not alone in having flowers speak for me. Below, find a roundup of the most elegant, exciting, absurd wedding cake designs from the perspective of contemporary bakers.

A surreal, leaning baroque sculpture cake

“One morning I woke up from a DM from Chloë Sevigny. She was like, 'Hi, I really like your cakes. I’d possibly be interested in having you make my wedding cake.’” This is how Aimee France, better known as @YungKombucha420 on Instagram and TikTok, wound up creating the certified It girl’s surreal, leaning earl grey cake that looks like it would be at home at the Mad Hatter’s tea party in Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. Aimee is recognized for her diligent attention to detail, her giant baroque cake towers—an effect she achieves by layering buttercream while piping—and the long lines that form at her pop-ups for hungry New Yorkers hoping to get a taste of one of her creations.

“I don’t think anyone ended up eating the cake at all,” Aimee confesses., “Someone at the wedding told me that they only used it as a cutting cake.” Coincidentally, I ran into Chloë at the annual Tibet House Benefit Gala a few weeks ago and asked about her cake. Besides commenting on how cute Aimee is, the icon also mentioned that this cake wasn’t served (they had a sheet cake made in the kitchen). “Only I and a select few actually ate this one,” she admits. It’s true that one of the basic functions of a wedding cake can be to serve as a sculptural marker of place—a statement that reminds you of how indulgent, sweet, over-the-top love and celebration can feel.

A timeless, Louise Bourgeois–inspired, 11-tier edible lace cake

Margaret Austin, founder of Outline in Brooklyn, asked her longtime friend Paris Starn to design her wedding cake. The result? An enormous 11-tier banana-caramel-biscoff cake (“the trinity of flavors” according to Paris), with edible lace. “Margaret wanted her cake to feel timeless,” says Paris, a clothing designer turned baker, who often incorporates sartorial elements of the wedding into the cakes. “When looking at Margaret’s outfit, which was this gorgeous dress from The Row with all of these overlaying pieces of crochet fabric, I wanted to reference that in the cake.”

For further inspiration, Paris referenced a Louise Bourgeois sculpture from Dia Beacon called Lair. It took her over two weeks to make all of the lace for this cake. Because of the time involved and the need to refrigerate, only the top layer of this cake was a “real” cake. Paris baked a separate sheet cake to serve to guests, allowing both for more intricate decoration on the outside of the cutting cake and fresher, more delicious sheet cake that is actually being served to guests. Another perk? “It takes the kitchen a really long time to cut cake,” Paris explains. With Margaret’s cake, there was only 10 minutes between when they did their cake cutting and slices of cake hit the tables. Individual pieces of the painstakingly made lace laid gently atop each slice of cake for guests to enjoy.

A croquembouche tower

Ella Riley-Adams settled on a croquembouche, a French conical crème-puff tower, after writing a story for T Magazine on the history of the cake style (it began with a Napolean-era baker.) Combined with childhood memories of making croquembouche with an uncle who was a cook in France, she set her heart on this traditional dessert for her wedding in the Beaux Arts–style Boathouse in Prospect Park. “I love that it’s so carefully built, but not precious to eat—at our wedding, people could just take the puffs straight from the tower with their hands,” she says.

Ella found Nikki Pensabene of ByPensa to ultimately make the dessert, through a referral from the owner of Otway. Since the bakery makes “the best cardamom bun in town,” according to the bride, the couple trusted her recommendation. While ByPensa is known more for its funky, shaggy cakes, Nikki was up to the challenge to build the croquembouche. “I wanted something grand and very elegant with the pansies on there,” Nikki recalls. “Something delicate, but also a showstopper. And it's definitely taller than most of my wedding cakes that I do.”

The couple requested pansies to complement their whimsical summer garden theme as a reference to Alice in Wonderland, where they sing, “You can learn a lot of things from the flowers / especially in the month of June.” Though not technically a “cake,” croquembouche sits pretty at a wedding party, evokes celebration, and alludes to conventional tall multitiered wedding-cake shape while actually being a more flowing, conical structure.

An amorphous, avant-garde fantasy cake

I first encountered the work of Amy Yip, a.k.a. Yip Studio, at an anniversary party at the design studio Hudson Wilder. Her signature move is to make cakes that look like rocks—not pretty crystals like amaranth or rose quartz, but rocks that lean more industrial. Think black and gray stones you could find on the streets of Bushwick turned into a cake that would feel at home at a goth party in a Manhattan loft. Amy’s wedding cake designs take that edgy notion and brings an elegance to it, if not a softness.

While a couple has yet to order a massive gray rock as a wedding cake, Amy has applied her modern sensibility to design this cake for the art-dealer couple behind Deli Gallery. “They had a color palette using a lot of greens and oranges, and that was kind of the only parameter I had to work within,” she says. Amy flew in passionfruit from an Instagram follower’s dad who grows them right in his backyard in California. She also used orange poppies, an allium, and a monstera leaf from her own plant at home. The result? An amorphous, cosmopolitan structure on the outside, a half oolong rose lychee, have yuzu shiso for the inside.

A jelly swan and heart cake

In 2019, Lexie Park, a veteran of Opening Ceremony and Phlemuns Nonbasics, changed careers in favor of creating suspension jelly cakes under the moniker Nünchi and hasn’t looked back since. “My dad used to always tell me that I didn’t have any nunchi,” she says. While there’s no direct translation from Korean, nunchi is like “reading the room and being able to gauge other people’s moods. It's an insulting thing when someone tells you you don’t have it.” Her dad’s words bled into her friendships. “I would say it all the time, ‘You guys need more nunchi,’ says the Los Angeles–based designer. “So, when I started [making cakes], I was like, ‘Oh, maybe if you eat my cake, you can have more nunchi.’”

What sets Lexie’s cakes apart is the shape. Jelly doesn’t really work on a large scale so for this wedding cake design she decided to do many tiny cakes. Lexie created a tiramisu heart for the bride and groom to share and individual strawberry yuzu cheesecakes for each guest, each with its own swan. The mood board for Anna Park and Tony Su’s wedding included very lacy swans, pastel colors with a little bit of red, and a heart-themed kind of wedding. “They really wanted swans in [the cakes.”] The lucidity of the jelly cakes were in line with the wedding location—oceanside at Frank Lloyd Wright Jr.’s Jester House in the Portuguese Bend region of LA and were in line with the understated cool that defines Lexie’s signature style.

An opulent, Italian Renaissance–inspired floral pistachio cake

Lucie Franc de Ferriere, the self-taught baker behind the Lower East Side bakery From Lucie, is renowned for her bold floral decorations. For a wedding at opulent Cipriani Wall Street, Lucie took her homemade garden style and created a bright, abundant centerpiece cake. “The bride had sent me a mood board of her wedding style, and it was giving a lot of Italian Renaissance.” While Lucie’s florals tends more towards muted pastel flowers, she had fun with the challenge of incorporating brighter colors.

The couple wanted pistachios in the cake as a part of their Iranian heritage. In addition to the flavor—pistachio sponge cake with sumac strawberry jam and champagne Swiss meringue buttercream—Lucie opted to surround the whole bottom of the cake with them. She was excited about it because “it made [the cake] look busier and more gardeny, which I really like because the pistachio color is so earth-toned.” As for decorating with flowers, Lucie typically goes to the Union Square Farmers market and works directly with a florist. But if a bride requests a nonedible flower, the solution is to add a pipette surrounding the stem so that the flower doesn’t actually touch the cake itself. Something I’ve always wondered about!

An autumnal sheet cake

Sammy Rees of By Saison tends to attract “non-fussy” brides who throw smaller weddings. “Everything I do is very inspired by the seasons and what's at the farmer’s market,” she says. “I spend a lot of time upstate.” For inspiration, she asks questions like “What’s blooming? What does the grass look like?” Drawn to natural elements, her cakes tend to be very flower- and fruit-forward. “I don’t focus too much on piping and technical details like that,” she adds. “A little more natural, rustic, effortless look.”

For the wedding of her friend Alexandra Lucia Sourbis, this came easy, as the bride is a wedding florist. They used leftover flowers in moody purple hues and in-season figs for this September wedding at Frank’s Wine Bar in Carroll Gardens. In keeping with the theme of Franks, a classic Italian restaurant, the bride wanted a cake that tasted like rainbow cookies but didn’t look like it from the outside. They went with an olive oil and almond cake with a raspberry compote and fresh raspberry filling, and an almond mascarpone cream as the frosting.

A trompe l’oeil cake

French chef Zelikha Dinga began Caro Diario, her creative catering company, eight years ago in Paris. Though she initially did not train in pastry, she’s since taken on a few weddings for couples seeking her chic, inventive style. Shawn Lakin and Matthew Spector’s outdoor wedding took place at a venue with a Greek stone theater, which was “kind of white—of course we take inspiration from the place,” Zelikha explained. “For this wedding cake, I had the idea to make a kind of trompe l'oeil cake, which embraced the shape of the table,” she says. Her cake design was perfectly sized to take up the entire surface of a semi-circular table, to the point where “you wouldn't see the difference between the actual tabletop and the cake.”

Before it was decorated with the glazed cherries that they brought from the south of France, a waiter, not noticing the cake on the table, put a full tray on it. “I turned to him and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, are you kidding me? That’s the cake!’” This was about 30 minutes before dessert. “He took it straight out of the cake and half of the cake went out with this tray.” Luckily, they were able to fix it up with remaining cream! Not only does this cake fill an entire surface, but that surface is rounded. This is the type of statement cake that will leave couples wishing they had thought of it themselves and will surely be imitated for years to come.

A Frankenstein cake

Specializing in colorful, maximalist style, Jen Monroe of Bad Taste draws inspiration from the couples she works with. In the case of artist Katie Stout, who made her wedding dress by sewing together many other wedding dresses into one long piece, she decided to make “weddings” the theme. “The theme was multiple different cakes that had all been Frankensteined together into this hybrid cake identity in a way that is totally absurd, totally impractical, totally over the top,” Jen recalls.

Components included a bottom layer completely covered in candy, a classic layer with white pearl beads, 15 bride and groom statues sourced from eBay, and a multicolored layer that was stuffed full of a hidden candy core so that when the bride cut into it “a bunch of candy, piñata-style, fell out onto them as a fun surprise.” The bride’s art studio made the goopy teal cake tray and the foot-tall bride and groom statues.

On interest in her hyper-maximalist style, Jen wonders “how much of that is push back against just the collective darkness politically and socially and culturally of the past couple years, that people are really interested in things that feel really over-the-top and really fun and playful and Marie Antoinette–esque, things that are really impractical and exuberant.”

A dollhouse whipped cream cake

Mina Park of 99 has perfected a delightfully symmetrical, romantic pipette style. She describes her aesthetic as “ultra romance,” pointing out that what she “unlocked” with this particular cake is the horizontal shell pattern above the tiers and the ruffles beneath the strawberries. “I like to think of fabrics when I am making cakes,” Mina explains, referencing drapery and how this cake in particular looks like a dress at the bottom.

“What kind of makes my cake design specific to me is that I’m working with whipped cream, so it’s always going to have a softer look. The edges are not as sharp as a buttercream cake. Still, it doesn’t mean there’s no definition, but there’s definitely a look to it, just purely from the material that it's made out of.”

Even though she actually made this cake for a birthday, Mina admits that it’s her “dream wedding cake design.” This three-tiered, strawberry cream cake is an elegant take on quintessential wedding cake.

A chunky, wide, rustic three-tier cake

Natasha Pickowicz is literally an expert on DIY wedding cakes. Her latest New York Times article on the subject encourages readers to “go rogue” and offer to make your friends a wedding cake instead of getting them a registry gift. Many of the bakers I spoke to for this story have used Natasha’s recipes from her 2023 book, More Than Cake, for their own wedding cakes. “I don’t use fondant, I don’t do gum paste,” Natasha insists. “I want everything on the cake to be delicious, organic, natural, as much as possible. I think that things should look beautiful, but they should also taste great so I strive more toward wanting things to taste great than wanting things to look picture perfect.”

Structurally, she opts for tiers that are wider than they are tall as that eliminates the need for boba straws or dowels, which are often used as structural support inside the cake, and prefers to collaborate on the design with the wedding florist, her choice being Mindy Cardozo. “Mindy works definitely within a seasonal palette with florals. And I’m the same way with cakes.” For this wedding at the Wythe Hotel last October, Mindy put aside select flowers for the cake, and Natasha decorated the cake on-site. Natasha’s relaxed and easy sensibility with design is a reminder that you can do it yourself, even when it comes to wedding cake.

An ikebana cake with sugary flowers

Pelah Kitchen founder Jenneh Kaikai brings a playful botanical design to the world of wedding cakes. The Brooklyn-based cake designer typically uses fresh flowers from farmers markets to avoid flowers that have been imported or sprayed with pesticides, but Alexandra Massillon and Daniel Magill’s December wedding in Brooklyn made sourcing local flowers a difficult task, especially as the couple had requested an ikebana theme. “Because it was December, I actually worked with [Justun Giordano], who I met on Instagram, who makes these really lovely gum paste flowers,” she explains. With fresh flowers as her signature style, an aversion to silk or artificial flowers, and a need for simple, upright flowers during December—a difficult season for local flowers—to complete the ikebana look, the edible flowers were a simple fix for the outside of this cardamom-spiced carrot cake with brown butter cream cheese filling and burnt honey Swiss meringue buttercream frosting.

A double barrel, robin’s egg blue vintage cake

New June, a Philadelphia bakery specializing in vintage cakes, has perfected the art of Victorian English Lambeth piping. Pictures of this robin egg blue cake caught my eye. “I would say more than 50% [of our wedding requests] are for an all-white, really classic cake, sometimes with cherries,” explains founder Noelle Blizzard,, but she’s most excited to work more with color. Noelle made this alluring blue cake for a wedding at the iconic TWA hotel at JFK International Airport in New York City.

The bride, stylist Lauren Martin, incorporated the blue throughout the day. “She had a few different looks; it was incorporated into her shoes at one moment, and one of her after-party dresses,” Noelle recalls. “There was robin egg blue ribbon incorporated into table settings.” The color also extended to the florals (blue hydrangeas) and blue paper airplane seating cards.

As for the structure of the cake, the couple opted for a double barrel, a less traditional style and build than a typical vintage tier cake. “All at once, it’s that Wilton-era American, but also very classic Victorian English Lambeth style,” adds Noelle. Finished with a family heirloom topper, Noelle baked a cookies-and-tahini cake and alternated chocolate devil’s food cake with chocolate-chip-olive-oil sour cream. The filling was cookies-and-marscapone whipped cream with tahini caramel, and a buttery graham cracker crumble, iced with a simple vanilla bean Swiss buttercream.

2024 wedding cake trends

As for cakes that will trend in the wedding season to come, the bakers agreed that while coquettish bows won’t have staying power in the wedding landscape, sheet cakes and vintage-style cakes likely will. What else is to come? Swans, long cakes, and an emphasis on experimental flavors.

Swans

A symbol of eternal love, swans have made their debut with Lexie’s midcentury jelly cake in early 2024. Noelle also notes that they’ve already been commissioned for cakes with meringue swans for the coming season. Swans famously mate for life, make a heart shape with their necks when facing each other, and represent pure romance. Is 2024 the year of the swan cake?

Long cakes

“I think people really like to see scale in a different way—traditionally how you see a wedding cake, the scale goes up vertically, so I think it's kind of relatively a new thing to see scale horizontally,” says Mina Park. Mina notes that Laila Gohar was doing this several years ago, but she sees this interest in scale building now. Aimee similarly pointed out the prevalence of “huge, really long sheet cakes,” noting that she wants to get people together around an undecorated one and having a group activity of decorating the cake.

“I love Swiss roll cakes,” says Lucie. “They have more butter cream in them and more jam and everything, and they make this whole rustic but also very nice long table. So I have a whole Swiss roll wedding coming up in the summer, actually, which I'm very excited about.”

Cakes that actually taste good

According to Natasha, more newlyweds are leaning experimental when it comes to their wedding cake flavors. “Couples are into yuzu and passion fruit and coconut,” she explains. “It’s less about those more traditional flavor profiles, but playing around more with these chef-y ingredients, which is great if you’re a baker because it’s more exciting.” Jenneh, who often incorporates spices from smaller spice brands like Diaspora notes that “people are interested in the cake truly as a dessert that they're serving to people as opposed to just a centerpiece, which is what I think it’s been traditionally.”

In conclusion…

Looking to have your cake and eat it too? Perhaps Paris is onto something by making an elaborate cake for show and a more complex sheet cake with the couple's “dream cake flavor”—in the back to serve to guests. Or maybe the croquembouche is the way to go—elegant and practical to eat. Perhaps a classic, organic seasonal offering? No matter which you choose, wedding guests are guaranteed to be pleased, as long as you let them eat cake.