Beneath the Icing

At the newly opened Patisserie and Delicatessen at The Oberoi,an enormous three-tier cake decked with delicate pink roses stands near the entrance. A replica of this cake will come for about Rs 3,000 a kilo and considering wedding cakes easily go upto 20 kilos,prepare to shell about Rs 60,000 for a wedding cake. At this retail store you can also get your cake shaped into a trendy handbag or a pair of beautiful red stilettos. Even in lean times like these,cakes with five-digit price tags are in hot demand.

“Couples are getting adventurous with their wedding cakes,” says wedding planner Amrish Pershad. “At one wedding party we installed a pulley system to wheel in the cake with some drama. It gets tedious since cakes are fragile and even a tiny miscalculation can ruin it.”

In the West cake toppers are very popular and you can get some amusing figurines to describe your relationship. “A lot of couple are bringing these cute and sometimes whacky figurines to top their cake with,” says Renu Malhotra,who runs Renu’s Magic Oven in GK-I. For instance,there is “phone fanatic couple”,that features a couple in their wedding outfits talking on the cell phone and “out shopping theme” that has the bride missing and the groom staring at a placard that says “still shopping”.

“We almost always match the cake with the colour theme of the event,so if the cocktail party has the venue in shades of purple we roll out the cake in layers of mauve and deep purple,” adds Modi. It takes about four to seven days to roll out a wedding cake. “Recently,a wedding was themed around dance and we made dancing figurines on top of the cake.”

At Radisson MBD in Noida,you can top your cake with a picture of yourself and your partner. Just scan a picture and the hotel will print them out in edible ink so you can eat them up too. The printing comes at Rs 1,300 (plus taxes) per kilo and the minimum order has to be two kilos.

“Structured cakes are becoming very popular now. For these compositions,we build an elaborate stand and deck it with several small cakes that can be individually consumed. This season we did six such cakes in Delhi. Mini cupcakes are very popular in this design and we are also using isomalt sugar to create crystallised diamonds for toppings,” says Karan Singh,chief operating officer at Choko-La. These compositions are priced between Rs 3,500 and Rs 5,000 for a kilo.