Wedding-cake history involves a lot more than taste tests and good-luck traditions. Here's how this wedding staple started.
This Is the Real Reason Why Wedding Cakes Are White
Updated on Jul. 25, 2025
When I got married, I had exactly three criteria for the cake: 1) It had to be chocolate. 2) It had to be delicious. And 3) It had to be so aggressively white, it could blind a snowman. I got only one of those. In fact, my cake looked like it had been dipped in a vat of wedding bleach—white frosting, white pillars, white topper and little white accents. But why? Was it just a trend of that era? Nope. Because just this past weekend, I went to a friend’s wedding, and their cake was also a towering, frosty, white-on-white confection, with just enough red flowers to make it look like it had a minor frosting injury. It made me wonder about wedding-cake history and why are wedding cakes white.
But surely not all wedding cakes are white, right? That’s what I thought—until I fell into a Pinterest black hole and realized that approximately 90% of wedding cakes are either totally white or white-adjacent. Is it because white makes a nice blank canvas for decorations? Because it symbolizes purity? Or simply because white frosting is the easiest color to make? Whatever the reason, at this point it seems less like a color choice and more like a frosting-based commandment.
“White wedding cakes have long been a wedding tradition,” confirms Brittny Drye, editor-in-chief of the wedding magazine Love Inc. “But today’s couples are nixing them if they’re not a fit.” Some are even ditching cake entirely (gasp!). Still, she adds, white cakes remain one of the most enduring customs. In fact, a recent Knot survey named all-white cakes as one of the top wedding trends of 2025. So, yeah, they’re still going strong.
And as it turns out, the reason wedding cakes are white has nothing to do with vanilla extract and everything to do with social status, powdered sugar and Queen Victoria’s outrageously extra cake—which was both physically and symbolically heavy enough to start a multi-century trend.
So how did we get from the wedding cake’s humble beginnings to six-tiered, snow-capped monuments of matrimony? I asked Drye and two professional wedding-cake bakers—Odette D’Aniello of Dragonfly Cakes and Claire Flavin-Jones of Bombshell Bakes—to break down the tasty history. Read on for everything you ever wanted to know about white wedding cakes, sprinkled with some fun wedding-cake facts.
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Have wedding cakes always been white?
Nope! White wedding cakes are actually a pretty new invention—at least in the grand timeline of matrimony. Before the 18th century, cakes were usually whatever color they naturally came out of the oven. Think beige, brown and—brace yourself—meat-colored. Yep, sometimes the wedding cake was a meat pie.
Fun fact: An early British “Bride’s Pye” recipe included cockscombs, lamb testicles, sweetbreads, oysters and boiled calf’s feet—all mercifully disguised with spices. Which sounds more like a drunk wedding dare than a treat.
Another take on this tradition? “In medieval England, guests would bring small spiced buns or scones to stack into a tower,” says D’Aniello, who is also a cake historian. “If the couple could kiss over it without it falling, they were promised a prosperous marriage.” Adorable? Yes. Frosted? Absolutely not.
But to truly understand wedding cakes as we know them today, you’re going to have to look to the British royals. Flavin-Jones, who has won multiple awards for her wedding cakes, says that the white-iced wedding cake didn’t gain popularity until Queen Victoria’s 1840 wedding. Her enormous, elaborately white-iced plum cake weighed nearly 300 pounds and set a very high (and expensive) bar for brides everywhere.
Why are wedding cakes white?
White wedding cakes were the perfect mix of symbolism and status—representing purity, technological progress and social standing, all wrapped up in a frosty Victorian sugar bomb.
White symbolized purity
In the 18th and 19th centuries, white wasn’t just pretty; it was loaded with meaning. In Christian tradition, white symbolized purity, innocence and virtue, especially when it came to brides. So it was only natural that this symbolism extended to their cakes as well. A white cake, like a white dress, became a visual sermon on the bride’s moral character. Fun!
White sugar showed wealth
But white wedding cakes weren’t just about virtue. They were also a massive sugar-coated flex. “White icing really became a thing in the Victorian era,” D’Aniello says. “It symbolized purity, sure, but also wealth. Refined white sugar was incredibly expensive, so a white cake was an overt display of social status.”
Queen Victoria had a white wedding
Enter the royals. People had been icing cakes white before Queen Victoria came onto the scene, but much like she did with the white wedding dress, she took a fringe trend and made it go mainstream. Her 1840 wedding cake? A 300-pound, multi-tiered English plum cake coated in dazzling white royal icing.
“Wealthy aristocrats had featured white-iced cakes before,” Flavin-Jones says. “But Queen Victoria was the ultimate trendsetter. Her white cake became an aspirational symbol for the burgeoning middle classes.”
So, basically, if you were a Victorian bride without a white cake, were you even getting married?
Side note: Believe it or not, slices of Queen Victoria’s cake still exist, on display and even sold at auctions. In 2023, one slice from the 1871 cake was auctioned off for $818. Its texture? “Firm.” (Better than “dry and musty”!)
White icing helped preserve cakes
White cakes weren’t just symbolic and stylish—they were also practical. At the time, white icing wasn’t easy to make. It required powdered sugar, which was difficult and expensive to refine. The icing of choice, royal icing, was made from egg whites and superfine sugar, and it hardened into a glossy shell that preserved the cake for weeks. No fridge required!
White became the trend in America
Once Queen Victoria’s cake went viral (well, the 1800s equivalent of that, which was basically gossip and wedding etiquette manuals), the white-cake trend made its way across the Atlantic. American brides quickly adopted the white-wedding-cake tradition, and as sugar and baking technology became more affordable, white cakes became the default. “Just as Queen Victoria popularized the white dress, her white cake became a long-lasting tradition,” Flavin-Jones says. “And we still see that influence today.”
Today, even though modern weddings are all about personal expression (hello, doughnut walls), the classic white cake has stuck around. “We’ve made wedding cakes in every color of the rainbow,” adds D’Aniello. “But white is still the most popular.”
Why is it so popular? It’s simple, it goes with everything, it looks good in photos, and it makes Grandma happy, she says.
What is the history of wedding cakes?
Wedding-cake history is no (ahem) cake walk. In fact, it’s been through a lot of tasty twists and turns.
- Ancient Rome: No cake, no frosting—just a loaf of barley bread smashed over the bride’s head. Romantic!
- Medieval England: Towering piles of buns. Guests brought their own and stacked them into a spiced carbohydrate Jenga set. Kiss over it; just don’t sneeze.
- 17th-century France: Croquembouche arrives! That’s a caramel-glued pyramid of cream puffs that looks like the Eiffel Tower had a sweet tooth. (Although the Eiffel Tower wasn’t built until 1887.)
- 18th-century Britain: We see the birth of actual tiered cakes—and, finally, icing.
- 19th-century Britain and America: Queen Victoria brings the heat (and the white royal icing). The white wedding cake becomes the platinum standard. Interestingly, though, her epic cake wasn’t even the biggest. In 1947, Queen Elizabeth II (then Princess Elizabeth) wed Prince Philip, and their cake weighed more than 500 pounds!
- 20th-century America: We get cake toppers, refrigeration and, eventually, fondant (which people have a real love/hate relationship with). The cakes become softer, taller, sweeter and sparklier—just like our expectations for marriage.
When did wedding cakes get tiers?
Tiered wedding cakes came into fashion during the 18th and 19th centuries, inspired by church spires and status-symbol architecture. According to legend, one baker modeled his tiered cake after the steeple of St. Bride’s Church in London.
And those adorable plastic bride-and-groom toppers? They didn’t hit cakes until the 1950s in the U.S. Before that, it was all about sugar flowers and doves, or just letting the frosting do the talking.
“In recent years, we’ve seen trends like naked cakes, buttercream textures and even painted cakes,” says D’Aniello. One of her personal favorites? A four-tiered showstopper painted to look like Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” (Cue art-history majors swooning.)
What are some other wedding-cake traditions?
You’ve probably seen (or even participated in) some of these wedding traditions, but have you ever wondered why they exist? Here’s a cheat sheet:
Saving the top tier
It is traditionally frozen and eaten on the couple’s first anniversary—or the next time they get the munchies at 1 a.m. “At our bakery, we’ll remake the cake for your anniversary,” D’Aniello says. “It saves you from freezer burn and heartbreak.”
In medieval England, guests would take this tradition to the next level by bringing home a slice of the wedding cake to put under their pillow, believing it would help them dream of their future spouse. (And possibly ants.)
Feeding each other the first bite
A sweet symbol of partnership—unless someone smashes it in the other’s face. Then it’s a symbol of “sleeping on the couch.”
Cutting the cake
This used to be the big moment at a wedding reception. Now? “Some couples skip it entirely,” Drye notes. “Many are opting to forgo the formality of stopping the party for guests to watch, to avoid a break in energy on the dance floor.”
Having a groom’s cake
Especially popular in the South, this cake is a fun, sometimes goofy tribute to the groom’s hobbies. Think: deer heads, sports logos or a cake shaped like a toolbox. No, really.
In the end, there’s no single “right” kind of wedding cake or tradition. “It’s about creating something meaningful to you,” says Flavin-Jones. “Whether it’s traditional, sculpted or shaped like your favorite animal, it’s your wedding, your rules.”
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At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. For this piece on wedding-cake history, Charlotte Hilton Andersen tapped her experience as a longtime journalist who often writes about common curiosities, interesting facts and etiquette for Reader’s Digest. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
Sources:
- Brittny Drye, wedding expert and editor-in-chief of Love Inc.; email interview, July 20, 2025
- Odette D’Aniello, founder and CEO of Dragonfly Cakes; phone interview, July 19, 2025
- Claire Flavin-Jones, award-winning patisserie chef at Bombshell Bakes; phone interview, July 19, 2025
- The Knot: “15 Wedding Cake Trends for 2025 We Can’t Wait to Sink Our (Sweet) Teeth Into”
- BBC: “Slice of Queen Victoria’s wedding cake sold for £700”
- Smithsonian Magazine: “The Strange History of the Wedding Cake”
