After years of understated, rustic cakes, where naked edges and fluffy ruffles of buttercream were showcased at every wedding, a dramatic 180 is starting to emerge: Matte black everything. Just like the decor trend that's been gradually dominating kitchens everywhere, it seems there's a push away from the soft femininity and traditionalism of an all-white, elaborate cake to something striking, simpler, and moodier.
When Sweet Valley High star Brittany Daniel married broker/attorney Adam Touni earlier this summer, the couple's Banksy-inspired dark charcoal and copper cake was a showstopper. It was an edgy contrast to the bride's delicate, off-the-shoulder Trish Peng gown, the soft candlelight filling the room, and the lush greenery. And yet it worked. It pulled out the copper tones from the geometric lanterns hanging everywhere and could hold its own against the rugged exposed brick walls.
It was an unexpected twist, but to baker Kimberly Bailey of The Butter End, it was spot-on for the couple — and evidence of a wave of people who are more willing to break free of tradition and go with desserts that fit their personality, even if it might make their parents shudder.
"Whenever I can convince someone to do it, I am all about it," Bailey said. "I think oftentimes, the bride and groom are down with it; it's when they bring their parents to the tasting that the mother is like, 'You can't have a black wedding cake!' Sometimes their instinct gets overridden by the parents."
Bailey, who worked with Daniel and Touni on their cake, typically asks couples about their interests in art during her consultation. When she learned the duo shared a love of a Banksy print of a girl reaching for a balloon — an image so important they put it on their invitations — they decided to echo it in the cake as well.
"They weren't afraid of color, which I love," Bailey explained. "They had seen another cake I did that was charcoal with copper and leaves, so we thought if we could do a hybrid, that'd be great. We'd keep the stencil of the girl small, so it didn't take over the whole cake."
Gradually, Bailey's seen more clients request darker, more dramatic desserts. Every week, she gets notified of her cakery's most popular pin on Pinterest — and almost every time, it's an image of a similarly sleek cake she did for Jimmy Iovine. (You can actually see the cake at the end of his HBO documentary, The Defiant Ones.)
"It's a tall cake that was black and dusted with midnight blue luster, then covered in silver dragées and sugar pearl combination in very different sizes," Bailey said. "It's like a midnight sky with some luster. When people see it, they totally want it, and I'm always surprised, because it's so unexpected."
Unlike the frillier, feminine cakes of years past, these desserts are all about simplicity — and sleekness. The frosting is sculpted to such a degree that you could hold a ruler to the edges of every tier.
"And we do!" Bailey laughed. She gets such precise lines from coating the cake in ganache, then covering it in Choco Pan — a chocolate coating that looks like fondant. "Without that awful taste that fondant has," she said. Bailey doesn't use food coloring, either, so you don't have to worry about taking a bite and staining your entire mouth black. Instead, she blends up to 10 shades of Choco Pan to get it just the right color.
Bailey, who also created a black and gold layer cake for Big Bang Theory star Kaley Cuoco's birthday, keeps things contemporary — instead of veering goth or stodgy — by sticking to tall, canister-like tiers and adding simple, often metallic accents, like Daniel and Touni's copper leaves or Iovine's silver dragées.
Though these dramatic cakes aren't as popular as watercolor ones or more traditional designs, Bailey's California clients aren't the only people opting for something different. A Google search for "black wedding cakes" yields 119,000,000 results.
If this emerging trend follows the matte black kitchen trend, expect to see more and more over the next two or three years, as interest expands beyond the Hollywood set and the west coast of the U.S.
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