Why do grooms get the coolest cakes?

Posted by

While perusing the OBB Flickr pool for wedding cake photos I kept stumbling upon some amazingly unique cakes and when I'd check out the descriptions I'd notice that more often than not they were the groom's cake. I saw so many wonderful cakes that I couldn't help but share them with you.

The Groom's Cake An extremely talented bride actually made this groom's cake. The poor bear is so delicious that it's actually eating it's own eye.

wedding photosThis cake is from De Anne & Warren's The Hitchening. Warren asked for “an octopus on the cake, wanting/protecting it… but the octopus should also be made of cake.” Ta-da!

Grooms CakeThis NES cake is from Aly and Nathan's wedding. Who hasn't loved their Nintendos so much that they wanted to eat it!?

Surprise Grooms Cake More of an XBox fan? Not a problem check out Jay's “surprise X Box 360 groom's cake.” Surprise! It's fraking awesome!

Both cakes 1 I love that this cake from Lea and Jess' Wedding for several reasons. First even though they called it the groom's cake it was actually for Jess, the other bride of the day. And it plays off of the wedding cake toppers. It's a devil duckie on a lake of fire and it apparently mimics her wife's tattoo.

Groom's Cake Here's an Igloo cooler with beer. Yum on both levels. Any home brewers out there? You could pull this off with some of your special wedding day brews!

warp to level seven Sometimes groom's cakes aren't even cakes, like this pixelated Mario spread from Adri and Christian's wedding. LOVE LOVE LOVE this.

Look at this cake!!Dannette surprised her groom with this drum cake that matched his own white snare drum. The customized drum sticks were a brilliant touch.

cakesRice Krispie Treat cake FTW! I would eat this “cake” from Shea and Jason's wedding every night for dinner AND dessert. In fact, right after I finish this post I'm going to make one.

img052 This groom's cake is a double whammy — two cakes! But I absolutely love that skull cake.

IMG_0660 This is the Superman cake from Jennifer and Mark's vintage Barbie wedding. It was beautiful executed by a local mom and it's so appropriately topped with Superman rescuing Lois Lane!

The dragon cakeMeet the dragon cake that stole my heart. I don't know if I would even be able to eat this guy. But apparently the groom could and he even got to cut slay it with a sword.

Did you or your partner have an awesome “groom's cake” at your wedding? Submit a picture of it to our Offbeat Bride Flickr pool [be sure to tag it “groom's cake”] and I just might do another mind-blowing groom's cake round-up!

Meet our fave wedding vendors

Comments on Why do grooms get the coolest cakes?

  1. MAN! I thought my rice crispie treat cake idea for our wedding was going to be the first of its kind! What a joy to know that im not the only nutso bride out there!

    • I told my mom that I wanted to do the layered round cake out of Rice Krispie Treats, and I didn’t know anyone else had already done it. Like Valerie said, so cool to know I’m not the only wackadoo out there. (Still working on mom and the aunties to convince them that we don’t HAVE to have a sheet cake to go with.)

  2. I’ve always been kind of confused as to what the tradition behind the Grooms cake was? Anyone able to help a girl out?

    • Hey Twist, click on the word “groom’s cake” at the beginning of the article — I’ve linked it to the groom’s cake wikipedia page.

        • Aww that write-up doesn’t do it justice though.

          Originally, the groom’s cake was a fruitcake. It would be sliced up and put in boxes for guests at the wedding. Single women were supposed to sleep with the cake under their pillow and it would bring them dreams of their future husband.

          In the South it used to be that this cake was often served at the rehearsal dinner though these days it’s made the switch back to the reception.

    • The way it was explained to me is that wedding cakes can be very girly (lot’s of pink ribbon and little flowers) and if the groom disapproves he can have a ‘manly’ style grooms cake instead.

      Considering I’m another one who thinks the grooms cakes always look more fun I’m hoping our wedding cake will look cool enough to keep us both happy. No idea what it’ll actually look like yet though.

      I love, love, love that octopus cake though! It looks like it’s trying to steal the cake! 😀

  3. We’re having a Nightmare Before Christmas cake complete with Jack and Sally cake toppers. We found a cake design we both liked and it’s quite small so I guess technically we’re only having a groom’s cake

  4. I LOVE the groom’s cakes, as much as I don’t like the girly vs. manly idea behind it. Though she isn’t a groom, I’m getting my wife an groom’s cake: the big ugly grey bleeding Armadillo Cake like in Steel Magnolias!

    • Mandy! Did you see the rubber ducky cake above? That’s the same deal as yours — Lea got her wife a groom’s cake as well. And that bleeding armadillo cake is ALWAYS the example I give when people ask me what a groom’s cake is all about. 😉

    • me too! I’d have that as my wedding cake in a heartbeat – think how cool/romantic if it were 2 octopi entwined lovingly around the cake! sadly I’m way too lazy for that so will probably just poach the rubber duckie cake toppers as we’re already incorporating rubber duckies into the wdg

  5. I wish we had Groom’s Cakes here in the UK…we could get one in the shape of a bus!! As it is, we’re having very non-girly choc-chilli cupcakes

    • You could totally have a grooms cake. Just because the tradition began in the southern US doesn’t mean you can’t take it make it your own.

  6. We’re both such Green Lantern fans, we have no need for different cakes. I’m making a big one in the shape of a Green Lantern symbol, with Green Lantern action figures as toppers. I can’t wait!

  7. When I told my boyfriend about grooms cakes (unknown in the UK I think) his first reaction was to yell “Batman cake!”

    Don’t tell him but he’ll be getting one of those for his birthday. (Not keen on being represented by Catwoman on the wedding cake. Storm maybe, or Witchblade, not Catwoman.)

  8. We’re not getting a 2nd cake because we can’t even afford the 1st (instead of paying for what is essentially a lot of decoration on a very ordinary-tasting cake, we are getting a giant tiramisu)…but I like the idea of having fun with funkily decorated cakes.

    What bugs me is that the groom, as per this tradition, gets a cake that reflects his interests, hobbies or personality. The bride, however, is expected to want (or is often cajoled by her female relatives into getting) some girly pink and white frosted castle thing…that doesn’t reflect her personality at all except for it being in colors she likes and showing that she is, in fact, female with “traditionally female” tastes.

    Not cool.

    I fully support taking the idea of a groom’s cake and making it for the couple: either having a funky cake as the main cake, or having it for both of the as sort of a laugh on the Wedding Industrial Complex (“see, we got the foo-foo cake, but we also got this giant zombie crocodile!”)…unless the girly cake is really want she wants. Then, great!

    I do wish that’d been addressed more in the article…but oh wellz.

    • Yes! You’ve articulated just why they make me uncomfortable. Bride’s cake = WIC compliant, groom’s = fun and personalised.

      Our cake will have robots on it 😀

      • Robots!

        Our non-cake does have a topper – Kang and Kodos from the Simpsons. I made Kang a little bowtie and Kodos gets an organza veil and tiny bouquet. It’s even funnier because we’re not wearing those things…

    • Even if it wasn’t addressed in this article it seems to be a popular idea on this forum and definately something that needs to be encoraged in the world in general. If nothing else personalised cakes are so much more fun and exciting.

      It’s one reason we asked my mum to make the cake. She’s always made me and my siblings birthday cakes and she’s done some fantastic ones so we’re hoping between the 3 of us we’ll come up with something really cool and interesting. No idea what at the moment.

      (The other reason is we want 3 tiers: 1 fruit cake, 1 vanilla sponge, 1 chocolate sponge, so everyone can have wedding cake that’s also something they like. I don’t want to deal with the looks a cake shop would give me when I asked for that.)

      • Almost all of the “traditional” wedding cakes I’ve had have been multi-flavour affairs, so I wouldn’t think a cake shop would balk at that. But it’s really cool that your mom is doing this!

  9. My sister made her hubby’s groom’s cake. They met when they were both working at a construction company, he as a team leader, she as the office admin. Well, she found this bumper sticker that said, “So many 2×4’s, so few studs.” He thought it was hilarious. A little while later, they started dating/got engaged/got married (it went very quickly–first date to wedding was just over six months, but hey, it was right for them).

    So, pardon the tl;dr backstory, the groom’s cake was made to look like a 2×4, and my sister wrote on it, “So many 2x4s, but I found me a stud!” Very cute, and very them. Seven years, two adorable kids, a dog, a cat and a bunch of fish later, he’s still her stud.

    • Awww.. okay that just pulled at my heart strings a bit. How cute is that. (btw, my dad works in construction, I’ll have to tell him that one)

  10. Wow – the topper on the Superman cake is the EXACT one Alex and I got for OUR topper! I don’t think we’ll go with an entirely Superman-themed cake, though!

  11. We are planning on the nintendo cake too but with a wii on top of that and maybe the one ring on top of that. Thats our “layers”. Then our cake topper will be Belle (From Beauty and the Beast) and Link from Zelda or Aragorn from LOTR. I do think I want a second cake with Wall*E and Eve on it. Though I’m thinking that will be my coldstone creamery ice cream cake that I really want for our bridal cake. NO pink and brown for this chick, its chocolate brown and mint green. Deeelish! It’ll be interesting how we keep that cold in June…

    • Yeah, for my wedding my first thought was icecream cake because I just don’t get excited about regular cake. Whenever I had a birthday cake growing up it was either icecream cake or cookie cake. But the thought of trying to make a giant icecream cake stay cohesive in August just seemed like too much, so we went with a cookie cake instead. A massive, three tiered cookie cake
      http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/aWRKGVdXZOw6__xz47kvDg?feat=directlink

      Sorry, that’s not really helpful. More of a “I remember having that concern. I ended up just going a different direction. Best of luck!”

  12. We’re having a multiflavor Corpse Bride/Nightmare Before Christmas cake along with an H.R. Giger grooms cake. But in reality, both of them are for US. We both love them. (although the grooms cake is a surprise to him. a friend of ours is making it and i am making the wedding cake with the help of my future M-I-L.)
    The wedding day (and the rest of our lives) is for US, not open to the worlds comments and interpretations. If people happen not to like our cakes, then they can watch us eat it together 😀

  13. I just wanted to point out that ‘groom’s cakes’ are also a great way to have alternate cakes when someone at the wedding can’t partake of the main cake. I’m vegan, and I offered to made a vegan grooms cake for my niece’s wedding. The groom didn’t know about them, so he was excited about getting whatever he wanted on the cake, and I was excited about being able to eat cake. At my wedding the main cake will be vegan, and there will be sugar free and gluten free secondary cakes for guests that have those dietary restrictions, because I believe pretty strongly that everyone needs cake!

  14. That octopus is fantastic! Our steampunk-octopus-themed wedding is just two days away. He would have fit in perfectly as a BRIDES cake. 🙂

  15. I had never heard of a “groom’s cake” until I read this page.
    Now, I REALLY want to surprise my HOT F with a cake that looks like a WWI tank 🙂 How the heck am I supposed to get that>?! lol!
    I decided that we need to ditch the traditional wedding cake, and just have a cutting cake (which is actually a watermelon, cut into cake shape, and spread with whipped cream and fruit. You’ve probably seen it on your FB news feed), and then hand out Subway cookies in baggies for the guests. He has been SO sweet to let me do that without a fuss!

Comments are closed.