Wedding rituals are very strange. Nobody knows why a lot of the ‘must do’ things we, er, must do at weddings even came to be. Every now and then someone at a wedding will claim to know why grooms must never do up the bottom button on their waistcoat, or why the best man claims it’s traditional for the best man to try and pull a bridesmaid. But on the whole we have no idea why we do the things we do on wedding days, or even why we want to do these things.
Of course not all weddings follow the traditional routine, hell, I’ve seen couples at weddings do things that would make your hair curl, but we all loosely agree traditions can be quite good fun. Brides get to order their friends and family around for a day, because it’s HER DAY. In my experience the groom is happy to let his new wife have her way, possibly because if she’s busy making sure she adheres to tradition she’s less likely to notice that the groom and the ushers have been draining hip flasks since breakfast.
If you’ve been following my blog for a while you might have noticed that I often talk about food. This post is no exception. And this time I’m going to pick on wedding cakes. I’ve seen some massive cakes in my time behind the lens, and some tiny cakes that look like they might have been bought from Aldi en-route to the church. I’ve seen cakes with edible people on them, with gaudy colours and even wedding cakes that seem to defy gravity.
But with almost all the wedding cakes I’ve seen the creator appears to have forgotten something crucial. Cakes should be edible! I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with the traditional fruit cake, but actually getting through the icing appears to require more manpower and planning than trying to steal the chauffeur's car (see previous blog post).
So I propose a new wedding tradition, and I’d like you the reader to be at the forefront of this new trend (because I want to be there taking the photos). I propose that instead of using boring old knives to cut the cake the bride and groom should be given a chainsaw. I was going to suggest a new tradition of the groom face-planting his new wife into the cake, but bearing in mind how tough icing is a broken nose would seem a messy and unwise to start a new life together.