![]() ![]() And while some Southerners view the groom’s cake as the “last bastion of gentility,” others think it’s an outdated tradition that’s not worth continuing - or at the very least, not worth spending several hundred dollars on when there are so many other expenses involved in throwing a wedding. Many couples are passing on the groom’s cake due to budget restrictions. Now, only about half of the weddings she bakes for request one. “You can be very, very, very unique.”Ĭarlton says that when she started her business, she made more groom’s cakes. “It’s a place to do something different and artistic,” she says. She says they offer the ability to be more creative and flex her skills as a sculptor and artist, whether she airbrushes character art onto a massive World of Warcraft cake or crafts ice cubes out of isomalt sugar for a cake shaped like a bucket of cold beer. “I always want them to go for it, because it’s often their last chance to really have some kind of say in the wedding.”Īs a baker, Carlton also just really likes making groom’s cakes. “I hate it when I see the groom saying, ‘Oh, honey, it doesn’t matter. A born-and-raised Southerner, Carlton is a proponent of the tradition, if only because many weddings in the South are very bride-centric. Jenean Carlton has been baking since she was in high school, and opened Carlton’s Cakes in Atlanta in 2015. But in 2023, when weddings can be as inclusive and creative as the people getting married want them to be, a tradition that was at one time rooted in finding a bunch of unlucky spinsters their dream man is increasingly feeling dated - for most, anyway. As such, it’s not uncommon to see a cake shaped like a college football team’s helmets or covered in camouflage icing or bedecked with the groom’s favorite bottles of booze. For some, they’re a beloved, long-standing tradition, and for others, they’re simply a way for grooms to express their hobbies and interests. Through the decades, just as most other aspects of the wedding have evolved with time, so have groom’s cakes. “I always want the groom to go for it, because it’s often their last chance to really have some kind of say in the wedding.” That still seems to be the case: bakers say that red velvet and chocolate continue to be among the most common groom’s cake flavors. In the Southern tradition, groom’s cakes were also baked with richer flavor profiles, which have long been coded as more “masculine” than delicate white wedding cake. One custom held that these cakes should be divvied up among the unmarried women at the wedding, the slices placed under their pillows as a good luck charm as they sought their own husbands. The tradition made its way to the American South as British colonists arrived in the region, and over time morphed into a single groom’s cake served alongside a big wedding cake. The origin of the groom’s cake lies in Victorian England, at a time when weddings typically had three cakes - one served to the guests, one for the groomsmen, and another for the bridesmaids - instead of the single, giant cake common at weddings today. It was a tradition that made perfect sense - the wedding cake is often painstakingly designed by the bride to her exact specifications, so why shouldn’t the groom get his own cake? And besides, who doesn’t want a slice of moist red velvet when the other option is a boring white cake coated in fondant? It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized that having a separate cake for the groom is mostly a Southern phenomenon. Usually, they were just regular-looking cakes, served on a separate table away from the main-attraction wedding cake. As someone from the South, I saw groom’s cakes at nearly every wedding I went to growing up.
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