Cupcakes or wedding cake, pie or fruit tarts a la Mr. Twistie, desserts are only enhanced by setting them down on something pretty. I went hunting around for adorable cake stands and cupcakes stands, and these were my faves:

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The lovely Jeannette sent me a link to The 7 Biggest Fattest Wedding Complaints, and I was looking forward to seeing what they were. Now having read them, I’m still not sure what’s fat about them, other than the complain that deals specifically with too much fried food, and I’m kind of disappointed. I was hoping to get some insight into the minds of guests – what are their wedding pet peeves, really? But for the most part, the essay dealt with menu choices and the always contentious cash bar.

All Fried Food
While haute comfort food is whimsical, trendy, and hard-to-resist (Gourmet fried chicken! Sustainably-farmed sliders! Duck fat fries!), try to avoid a menu that’s excessively fatty. Include a few healthful appetizers into the rotation to give your diet-conscious guests a break — and potentially more energy on the dance floor.

No Veggie Option
According to an April 2008 poll, 3.2 percent of Americans claim to be vegetarians, and 10 percent claim to follow a “vegetarian-inclined” diet. So, for the sake of 3-10 percent of your guests, try to incorporate a meat-free entree option or a few hearty veggie-friendly sides and appetizers.

Never-Ending Waits for Food Service
Wedding reception purgatory: We’ve all been there. Standing in a hotel courtyard or milling in front of a church, overdressed, underfed, sneaking a glance at your watch while making pained small talk. While logistics of event planning vary, the bride and groom should take care to ensure that guests are not left waiting for an hour or more with nothing to do, eat, or drink. Low blood sugar is not conducive to celebrating.

I can’t say I disagree with the three pet peeves able, but overall it’s not a particular stirring list. Sure, waiting to eat or worse, watching others eat while you’re still ages away from being served sucks. And while I’d have a field day at an all-fried wedding reception buffet, I know a ton of people whose disgust would equal my excitement.

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You have your black and white weddings, black and lime and white weddings, pink and black and white weddings, and pink and green weddings. Less common are wedding palettes featuring pink, green, black, and white where the white isn’t just an incidental addition in the form of floral fillers, blank spaces on wedding stationery, or candles. The more colors you add to your wedding color scheme, the more likely it is that you’ll have trouble finding stuff that features all of your hues together. Luckily, you don’t have to have every color on every little thing. Observe:

Featured on this pink, green, black, and white inspiration board are damask border table numbers from Papeterie; pink, green, and white bridesmaids bouquets by Pure Joy carried by bridesmaids in black; pink, green, and white favor cards; a pink, green, and black button bouquet from the amazing Princess Lasertron; adorable bridesmaids in green with black sweaters and pink scarves; a sweet table by Ravishing Radish featuring a cake by Tallant House; a chic and blingy wedding cake from a dessert table designed by Couture Cakery; and finally, a floral centerpiece that features almost all the colors in this scheme (even if you can’t see them).

Move over wedding cupcakes, wedding macarons, and meat cakes, for there’s a new faddish after dinner treat in town. That’d be cake balls, of course. Similar to the super duper mini cupcake pops features in 2008, cake balls are… wait, let’s take a sec to laugh at the word “balls”… cake that someone has lovingly crumbled and mixed with frosting until the whole sweet mess can be molded into cohesive shapes. In this case, balls, tee hee. These are then dipped into some relative hard coating – think straight up chocolate or confectioners coating – and possibly topped with something else, like a walnut, silver dragees, or coconut.

Sounds tasty, but are they a hit at wedding receptions? In the words of a certain controversial polebrity who makes my ears bleed, “You betcha!” Specifically, they’re a hit with guests like moi, who would prefer a spoonful of cake with her frosting and not the other way around. Cake balls are sweet with a capital S, and not everyone’s cup of tea – I’ve heard them referred to as pre-masticated cake. But as you can see below, they do make for some impressive wedding reception dessert tables!

The beautiful display of cake balls above comes from Objects of Confection and was photographed by Karmalized Photography. They appeared (and were no doubt lustily consumed) at the farmer’s market themed wedding of a certain Brad and April of San Fran.

via Weddings Unveiled Austin

Once upon a time, I’d avoid wedding cake if there were other desserts available or poke at it unenthusiastically – I have a sweet tooth, okay? – if it was the only sugary treat on offer. Maybe it was simply the caliber of weddings I attended as a child and teen, but I seem to remember that wedding cake back in the day was almost always a plain sponge cake, maybe half vanilla and half chocolate, with chocolate pudding or strawberry goo inside, blanketed by “buttercream” that was mostly shortening.

It looked pretty, but tasted… meh.

Does anyone else remember those? It would seem you can still buy that sort of thing, if the office birthday cakes I suffered through at employers past, but I’d be very, very surprised to see one at a wedding. An article sent to be by the lovely Omnibus Driver posits that the fancification of wedding cakes has a lot to do with the bajillion cooking-themed and wedding reality shows now on television. That’d be the “It’s on TV so I must really need it” phenomenon.

The wedding cake at one time was something of an afterthought, sliced and set out in little baggies for guests to pick up on their way out at the end of the evening. And not particularly tasty. Then came the bridal industry boom in the ’90s, the magazines and wedding planners, the Knot and the blogs and, most recently — naturally — the reality shows.

And thank goodness for them, say wedding cake designers, whose industry, however sugary its focus, hasn’t come through these tough economic times completely unscathed. “Without those shows, we would not be making it,” says Naomi Levine, pastry chef and proprietor of Tipsycake, a three-year-old bake shop at 1043 N. California.

Bridal industry boom, yes. But really now, reality television? I’d credit bridal bloggers more than anyone else for making me want a wedding cake that went beyond your basic vanilla sponge and silver dragees. Yes, that’s right, shout out to us! And as much as the wedding cake is now hailed as a centerpiece of the wedding, it’s still just food. Very beautiful food that may have cost $3,000, but it’s going to get eaten in the end. I tend to see the whole cake-in-the-spotlight trend as a way to upsell on the cake more than anything else. After all, you can have a beautiful, delicious cake without busting your budget or making it the guest of honor at your wedding reception.

(That beautiful wedding cake up there came from Lovin Sullivan Cakes in NYC)

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?

When I went searching on this very blog for the overlap between weddings and wood (get your mind out of the gutter!), I did not think I’d find as much as I did. We all know that trees give their lives so that we can have wedding invitations that look like wood, but how about wedding invitations that actually are wood, like those from Oslo Press? From there, I found:

• flowers made of wood
• wood wedding cake toppers
• ring “pillows” cut from wood
• wood-covered guestbooks
• and wooden wedding bands

I never did think I’d see a wedding cake of wood. It’s not real wood, of course, but according to Melody Brandon of The Sweet and Saucy Shop, the bride and groom wanted it to look as much like real wood as a cake possibly could.

I’d say that she certainly captured the essence of real wood in this most unusual wedding cake. There were other cakes and sweets at the wedding, so the wood wedding cake isn’t all that big, but there’s a part of me that wants to think of it as being, oh, about as big as a pile of railroad ties.

With this level of detail, wouldn’t a giant wood wedding cake be ridiculously impressive? If not a bit odd to dig into…