Dark colored icing equals dark colored teeth and tongues – If you don’t want a sea of black, purple or burgundy mouths in your wedding pictures, don’t ask for highly tinted frosting on your wedding cake.
There are ways to incorporate dark or bright colors in your cake design without actually having it go into someone’s mouth. You can safely add color by:
* Placing deep colored icing flowers on the plastic plates that are in between separated cake tiers. The color is still in the cake design, just not on your guests’ tongues!
* Using colorful fresh flowers as your cake topper, as “corsages” cascading down the cake tiers, as decoration in between tiers, and as a beautiful design surrounding the base of your cake.
( side-note: If the flowers touch icing that will be served, be sure the flowers are non-toxic, and preferably organically grown. Even though most flowers are taken off of a cake before it is cut, you don’t want toxic residue lingering. I have decorated cakes with edible flowers, where we made sure everyone had a pansy and marigold on their plate. The guests had fun daring each other to eat their flowers.)
* Having one or a few fake cake tiers (Styrofoam – iced and decorated as part of your cake) decorated with the bright colors that you don’t want to eat. The edible tiers can have the tamer icing colors on them.
* Using a band of material ribbon at the base of each tier. Be careful though – some ribbons actually bleed, or the icing can create grease spots on lighter weight ribbon. Do an icing/ribbon test to be sure your wedding cake won’t look more like a mud pie. Quality ribbon is a very easy way to add your bright or dark wedding colors to your cake without making your’s and your guests’ mouths look like circus clowns!
EBs – Do any of you have pictures or stories about black tongues and purple lips from your wedding cake icing? We’d love to see them!
Tags: wedding advice, wedding cakes, wedding planning, wedding wisdom
You are sooooooo right! We were married on Valentines Day; need I say more???
We all looked like Circus clowns with Bright red lips, tongues and teeth. It was not a pretty sight! You also forgot to mention how horrible highly tinted icing tastes! Next time around we will use fresh red roses not red icing roses!!!!