With this banana cake, I thee wed
Royal icing is traditional, but Debora Robertson says Meghan and Harry’s cake would be much more fun
As many of us feast on every tiny detail about the forthcoming nuptials of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the latest tasty morsel concerns the cake, specifically the banana wedding cake they are rumoured to have requested. Not for them, apparently, the stiff and sturdy layers of a traditional cake. No, as befits their delightfully informal approach to life, a banana cake is what’s called for.
In their unorthodox request, the couple reflect a growing trend that a wedding should reflect the tastes of the couple, rather than rigidly following airless protocol. Rosalind Miller, award-winning wedding cake designer, has said that traditional fruit cakes are no longer the popular choice, with couples choosing lighter flavoured sponges, or ditching the idea of a sweet cake completely, in favour of tiers of pork pies or cheeses.
Sarah Pettegree, owner of Bray’s
Cottage Pork Pies, explains: “Our diary’s full for most of the summer wedding season. Alternatives to cakes are noticeably a growing trend. Sometimes people do have a beautiful cake as well as a gorgeous big, tiered pork pie. People don’t feel nearly as bound by tradition or expectation – and that includes ditching the cake.”
Sarah’s pork pie centrepieces cost up to £450. Meanwhile, fashionable cheesemonger La Fromagerie offers a tiered cheese “cake” suitable for 150 guests for £600. By comparison, a banana cake seems disarmingly unassuming. Darren Mcgrady, former royal chef, has spoken about how, when growing up, the young princes loved anything banana-flavoured. And in the early days of their courtship last autumn, Meghan instagrammed a picture of two bananas spooning, with the message: “Sleep tight, xx”.
It is almost certain, though, that even this most modern of couples won’t get away without also having the typical royal wedding cake, if only because of the tradition of giving slices as keepsakes (a slice of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s cake in its commemorative tin recently sold for almost £6,000 at auction) and wheeling the top tier out at the first christening. You can’t send a fragile sliver of banana cake to do a sturdy slab of fruitcake’s job.
In fact, Harry and Meghan will probably follow in the steps of William and Catherine who, like lots of modern couples, had two cakes. At their wedding in 2011, there was the eight-tiered extravaganza of white sugar, which took Fiona Cairns and her team five weeks to complete. Then there was a chocolate cake, based on the teatime tiffin William enjoyed as a boy, albeit on a grand, three-tier scale.
In having two cakes, the couple are perhaps giving the nod to Meghan’s American roots. The notion of a groom’s cake began in 19th-century England and, despite falling out of favour here, remains a flourishing tradition in America, particularly in the South. This tradition was immortalised in the form of the famous armadillo groom’s cake in the classic movie, Steel Magnolias. Because nothing says “I will love you until the end of time” like grey, scaly icing concealing a red velvet cake that looks like a bleeding carcass when cut into. After that, a banana cake seems like a very tasty prospect indeed.