Food

Palace reveals Harry and Meghan’s very unusual wedding cake order

Mar 21, 2018

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, pictured at an International Women's Day event in Birmingham on March 8, have a lot of planning to do for their May wedding. Source: Getty

Well, it was never likely that they’d go for a traditional fruit cake with marzipan icing and an little plastic bride and groom on the top, but Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have made a very unusual choice for their wedding cake.

The royal family has revealed that the engaged couple, who’re due to be married in a heavily anticipated ceremony in May, have picked not the official palace bakers but a London pastry chef called Claire Ptak to make their cake. And they’ve chosen a lemon elderflower cake as their wedding cake.

The cake that the US-born chef will make will “incorporate the bright flavours of spring,” according to the palace’s Instagram post, and will be covered with buttercream and decorated with fresh flowers. Ptak “focuses on using seasonal and organic ingredients in her cakes,” the post read, adding that “Ms. Markle previously interviewed Chef Ptak for her lifestyle website The Tig. Prince Harry and Ms. Markle are looking forward to sharing the cake with guests at their wedding at Windsor Castle on May 19th”.

A look at Ptak’s own Instagram account provides a taste of what the couple might expected – but no doubt on a much grander scale – on their wedding date, given that it’s full of gorgeous cakes decorated with flowers, including this lemon curd cake decorated with poppies and eucalyptus leaves.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BfWMrHGgjIB/?hl=en&taken-by=violetcakeslondon

Ptak makes clear it’s a team effort, though, at her bakery, called Violet Cakes, in London.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Be-mT4uAyA7/?hl=en&taken-by=violetcakeslondon

A rhubarb birthday cake looks beautiful in pale pinks.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BenyfXCgojA/?hl=en&taken-by=violetcakeslondon

A wedding cake made for a couple called Mina and Freddie involved chocolate devil’s food cake covered with vanilla bean and Swiss meringue buttercream. And, of course, plenty of flowers.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bb92rqsByMt/?hl=en&taken-by=violetcakeslondon

The natural-looking, not particularly polished cakes are a far cry from the usual royal wedding cake, which are usually made by the palace’s bakers. For Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip’s wedding almost 71 years ago, guests dined on a 500-pound (220 kilogram), 9-foot-tall (2.7 metre) cake that produced slices for 2,000 people.

That cake was a labour of love from the Queen’s subjects in Australia – because rationing was still in place in the UK, girls from the Australian Girl Guides Association donated the ingredients. To thank them, the newlywed couple sent a whole tier of the cake back to Australia for them to enjoy.

A piece of the cake sold at auction for £500 (AU$911, $US699) just two years ago and, incredibly, was still edible despite being 68 years old.