Manolo for the Brides

Yes, you read that right. I’m talking about cake hats. For those who want to top their wedding cakes with something other than the usual bride(s) and/or groom(s) statuettes, sparkle monograms, and anthropomorphic animalia, Alison Dawson of Toronto, Canada founded Chapeau de Gateau.

Dawson creates custom cake hats using the finest quality Mokuba ribbon, and each wedding cake topper is made with the couple’s wedding colors or theme in mind. Or, if you already have a cake design in mind, I’m thinking you could have a ribbon model of your wedding cake created in miniature. (Put a hook in it and you have a keepsake decoration — I’m thinking a wedding cake on your Christmas tree.)

I definitely don’t hate cake hats, since they’re rather pretty and you’re not going to see them on every other wedding cake. I do think they’re a bit silly, but these are wedding cakes we’re talking about here. How dignified can a cake possibly be? Conversely, how much will a wedding cake’s innate dignity suffer if you put a little fancy hat on it? My guess: Not much.

What say you?

How freakin’ cute are these retro deer wedding cake toppers from Dear Girlface? Oh em gee, if The Beard and I hadn’t topped our cake with statues of our kittehs, these are what I would have wanted. And I usually hate wedding cake toppers!

Made lovingly by hand, as it says in the description, these adorable deer are crafted from high quality felt, ribbons, fabric flowers, and vintage buttons. Each deer is unique, but if what’s on offer doesn’t ring your bell, you can have yours custom made with your choices of colors, genders, and details like eye patches!

At six inches tall, no one will overlook your totally sweet choice of wedding cake topper. I usually scoff at wedding products that boast heirloom potential, but I could definitely see these standing the test of time — especially if they can be removed from the base and displayed individually (or played with!).

When I was growing up, the brides and grooms on cake toppers all looked alike. Tiny plastic people. All the women wore the same shape of gown, all the men wore identical tuxedos. For the longest time, pretty much the only difference was what color flip hairdo the woman wore.

Cake toppers have come a long way since then. Now you can even get sets of bride and bride or groom and groom. And Magical Day carries some even more specialized toppers like this:

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Forget the horrible, sexist bride dragging the groom to the altar cake toppers and the raunchy bride with her legs wrapped around the groom cake toppers. If you’re anything like me, you’ve seen so many novelty wedding cake toppers that you desperately long for an alternative. I can dig it. Luckily Bunny With a Toolbelt has got folks like us covered! Her carved wooden bride and groom bunnies, elephants (for the staunchly Republican bride and groom?), gators, birds, giraffes, dachshunds, and more are playfully quirky while still retaining a sense of elegance.

The donkeys, sadly long since sold, are my faves.

Plus the details are way cute. How about those tiny flowers on the bride donkey’s veil? I don’t know about you, but they make me say “Squee!”

The lovely Chris Oh, who gifted me with my very own copy of Katamari Damacy back in the day, sent me a link to an entirely too-well-done Katamari wedding cake. Not a topper, not a tier, but an entirely round katamari (a magical ball that allows anything smaller than it to stick to it and make it grow) in wedding cake form.

The bride (known on Flickr as offwithyourtv) and groom should roll it around until they encounter other wedding cakes in order to make a massive megacake.

But instead, they’re going to cut it. I have to admit that until I found the picture below, I was unsure as to how this wedding cake would be portioned out to guests. (Would you look at that dress!)

The answer: Start from the top and work your way down. Looks good, no? It makes me crave cake, in fact. The moral of this post is, of course, that anything done fabulously will be fabulous even if others might consider it weird or geeky or too outlandish for a wedding.

In honor of the new Star Trek movie, I have to let my geek flag fly and feature one Star Trek wedding cake and one Star Trek wedding cake topper that reader and friend oh_chris found on Cake Wrecks. While The Beard and I chose not to include the United Federation of Planets or Star Fleet in our nuptials, I can’t fault those who do because I harbor my own sci-fi fetishes (as does Twistie, I happen to know).

I especially like how nice a job the cake maker did with the Star Trek communicator tier. Sometimes themed cakes are done in such a slipshod way that you have to ask yourself why the baker even bothered to do anything other than stick a few of those pre-fab sugar thingies on. I’m guessing that the cake designer is a trekkie (or trekker, if you like) and was plenty pleased at that particular commission.

Though I’m not the world’s biggest wedding cake topper fan, since most of them are kind of cliched, but I have to say that I have a soft spot in my heart for original cake toppers, a la yesterday’s robot wedding cake toppers. So when I came across this DIY wedding cake topper kit from Goose Grease, I was at first smitten. It is, after all, only $8!

But then I started asking myself whether the individual components would be even less expensive and how well the toppers would turn out if the painter was less than painterly.

The seller will whip some up for you for $40, but honestly, I think I could do almost as good a job. YMMV where that is concerned. All in all, I like (not love or hate) the DIY wedding cake topper idea, but I have to wonder about the execution when one is using the above kit.

What say you?

Aren’t these cake toppers from The Builders Studio rad?

There are all kinds of cake toppers in the crafter’s Etsy shop, from elegant robots to secret agent robots to “Sky Captain Airplane Robot and Sexy Bride Bot Queen.” The only thing I did see was gay robot wedding cake toppers, but custom orders are accepted so it’s up to our homosexual brothers and sisters in matrimony to get the trend going!