It’s no secret the royal weddings can be a little over-the-top. Extravagance is one of the things the Royal Family does best, right? In part, this is is what draws so much attention to the big day.
Around the world, tens of millions and sometimes hundreds of millions of people tune in to watch these famous couples say “I do,” and it isn’t just because we love love.
The truth is, viewers of the royal weddings want to see who is wearing what dress, who will wear the wackiest hat, and what the flowers will look like. We want a chance to imagine what it would be like to be royal, to have a fairy tale wedding put on with a seemingly infinite budget. It is a lifestyle most of us can’t even imagine, but it sure is a blast watching from afar.
The Royal Family and all of their indulgences have become a part of wedding tradition around the world. One way we have seen this is by watching how their extravagant cakes have influenced trends. This likely began with Queen Victoria, who took a bold step and embraced new trends on her cake and made history with Victorian wedding cakes.
Let’s take a look at the most extra royal wedding cakes in history.
Queen Victoria and Albert
The beautiful cake featured at the wedding breakfast of Queen Victoria became a national obsession.
Traditionally, royal wedding cakes were a single-layer fruit cake that was iced with white frosting.
England became obsessed with Victoria’s choice to adopt a French flair for decorating her cake.
She didn’t buck tradition entirely.
She used fruit cake on the inside, but she did go all out when designing the outside of the cake.
Victoria’s cake was a single layer, English plum cake.
It was 300 pounds, 13 inches tall, and ten feet around.
On top of delicate icing were statues of Victoria and Albert dressed in Roman clothing, a statue of one of Victoria’s dog. and a sculpture of Britannia, the goddess of Britain.
According to The New Yorker, this was the first time that a royal wedding cake was obsessed about by the people of England.
And it certainly wasn’t the last. Obviously, our obsession with the Royal Family and their wedding ceremonies is still very much a thing!
Duchess Kate Middleton and Prince William
Their traditional wedding cake towered high at eight layers tall.
To achieve their wedding cake dreams, Kate and William asked baker Fiona Cairns to take charge of the huge task.
Their cake was eight tiers tall and featured a fruitcake recipe the two had eaten before, according to Town and Country.
Cairns was the expert and there are many protocols to abide by when making a royal wedding cake.
Still, Kate knew exactly what she wanted and came with detailed ideas for the baker. Talk about taking charge!
The end result was a detailed and delicate cake that weight nearly 200 pounds.
According to Bustle, the cake weighed in at 88 kilograms. It featured over 900 flowers made by hand from sugar paste, according to Royal.
In the center of the cake, there was a delicate monogram of a “C” and a “W.”
Overall, it was a classy but extravagant cake, exactly what could be expected from the Royal Family.
Duchess Meghan Markle and Prince Harry
This cake became a source of discussion because it broke a major tradition.
Most royal weddings feature a fruitcake.
For their 2018 wedding, Meghan and Harry were able to bend and even break some rules because Harry isn’t in line for the throne.
Instead of a fruitcake, the two chose a cake featuring lemon and elderflower flavors.
The inspiration for their cake was springtime, and it was covered with fresh blooms.
The baker hired to make that cake has very strong opinions about fruit cake.
Quoted in The New Yorker, Chef Ptak, who was hired to make the royal wedding cake by Markle and Prince Harry, thinks fruitcake is a joke. She takes baking very seriously, however, and brought a small army along to help her bake, assemble, and decorating the royal wedding cake.
The look of this cake, while certainly extra, is a departure from other royal cakes.
It has a more rustic feel since it is iced with buttercream instead of cover with smooth, marzipan fondant.
Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip
This royal pair literally took the cake with their massive dessert.
The finished cake weighed over 500 pounds and measured 9 feet tall.
Behind the cake was the chief confectioner at McVitie and Price Ltd, a company that has been making biscuits in the UK since their founding in 1809. It was designed the tiers featuring different scenes, including important moments from the couple’s life together.
The ingredients for this cake were secured in a very unusual way.
Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were married in 1947 when food rationing was still in effect after World War II. To get the ingredients needed for the cake, they accepted donations from their colonies, including South Africa and Australia.
As a thank you for their help, the donors received a tier of cake after the wedding.
We hope fruitcake travels well!
Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank
It looks like the princess drew some inspiration from Meghan and Harry’s cake.
Prince Harry and Meghan were the first in some time to break the fruitcake tradition.
Still, it appears they set the stage for other royal weddings to push the boundaries.
When Princess Eugenie and her boyfriend Jack Brooksbank, who dated for over seven years, got married they decided against fruitcake.
Instead, they went with chocolate and red velvet.
This probably sounds a lot better to wedding guests than the traditional fruit cake.
The design of the cake was inspired by the season.
The two were married in October 2018 and embraced Autumn as they made decisions about how their wedding cake would be decorated. It was a colorful cake, decorated with fall leaves cascading down the tiers.
And it was a massive cake.
According to Town and Country, the baker who made the cake used 400 eggs and 53 pounds of butter to turn their cake dream into a reality.
Princess Charles and Princess Diana
No list of the most extra royal cakes is complete without Princess Di.
The couple called on the Royal Naval cooking school to make the cake.
The head baker, David Avery, was in charge of crafting the dessert for their July 1981 wedding. The bakers arranged roses, orchids, and lilies of the valley into a breakthaking topper.
The cake boasted five stunning tiers.
On the tiers, The Royal Family’s coat of arms was used as decoration along with the couples’ first initials.
In 2017, royal family fans had a unique chance to own a piece of the cake.
RR Auction, a well-known auction house that deals with rare collectibles, put a piece of the cake up for auction. At that time, the slice was 36 years old and still in the commemorative box it was packaged in for wedding guests.
Auctioning off Royal Family collectibles, including wedding cake, is actually a fairly common practice.
Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel
The heir to the throne in Sweden, Crown Princess Victoria chose an unusual design.
Previous Royal Wedding cakes had been lavish in a very traditional sense.
They typically were adorned with flowers and ornate decorations. That isn’t the case for the cake at Victoria’s wedding.
Instead, she chose a design that was incredibly modern.
Each of the eleven tiers of her cake was shaped like a four-leaf clover and wrapped in a decorative ribbon at the base.
This royal couple met in an unlikely place.
Prince Daniel owned a gym before he met Princess Victoria. The two met after she wrapped up a personal training session and began seeing each other after that, according to Hello! Magazine.
They were engaged in 2009 and married in 2010 with a beautiful ceremony.
They now have two children together and Daniel will one day support Victoria when inherits the throne from her father.
Prince Edward and Sophie-Rhys Jones
Weeks were spent getting dessert ready for this royal event. Married in 1999, Prince Edward and Sophia-Rhys appeared to be traditional on the outside but was anything but.
The couple chose to abandon the typical fruit cake, instead opting for devil’s food cake.
In an interview with BBC, their baker confessed that a total of 515 and hours had been spent getting the cake ready for their wedding.
The recipe for Edward and Sophie’s cake took years to perfect.
Baker Linda Fripp was enlisted to create their seven-tier, ten-foot-high cake. She used a recipe she had been working on for years and said the result was absolutely delicious.
The most memorable thing about this cake is how it was decorated.
Two tennis rackets were created for the topper beacuse the couple had met playing tennis.
Princess Louise and John Campbell
Married in 1871, Princess Louise and her husband John Campbell made history in many ways. Most notable, perhaps, it had been over three hundred years since a commoner had married into the royal family.
Also worth mentioning?
That beautiful cake. Standing at over five feet tall, the most remarkable part of the cake is the figure of a woman on the topper.
In 2009, a piece of the cake still existed.
Although nearly 150 years old, the last known remaining cake from the wedding of Princess Louise was put up for action in 2009. It was just over an inch wide and the starting price was 145 pounds. Originally, the cake 225 pounds and included a whole lot of bright, white icing.
Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones
Waiting to marry paid off for Princess Margaret. The sister of Queen Elizabeth, Princess Margaret’s romantic life grabbed the attention of the media long before she met her husband Antony Armstrong-Jones.
While her sister was married in 1947, Margaret didn’t get married until 1960.
This worked to her benefit when it came to wedding planning, as the country had recovered from the economic difficulties brought on by the two World Wars, and this allowed the princess to go all out when planning her big day.
Margaret’s wedding and her cakes would go down as one of the most lavish the country had seen.
One elegant cake wasn’t enough, though.
The Princess actually had 20 different cakes at her wedding.
The largest cake weighed 150 pounds and featured trellises on each tier.
The sides of the cake were decorated with the Princess’s coat of arms the topper was constructed with flowers that were arranged to cascade down the cake.
