How to manage dietary requirements when designing your wedding cake
This topic really speaks to me, because I have a huge number of close friends and family who have various intolerances and/or food allergies, including me (I’m lactose intolerant which is not ideal for a baker!). Out of a guest list of 120 for our wedding, there are 45 of us with dietary needs. You read right, 45.
When designing my own wedding cake, and indeed when we were menu tasting, I agonised over getting all dietary requirements 100% right for my family and friends and its hard. Really, really hard.
The following ideas were ones that I came up with during the food tasting process, in order to help me decide what route to go down. I hope they prove helpful for you too.
1) You cant please everyone, so make sure you please yourselves. This was the option I least wanted to go with, mainly because there are so many people with dietary requirements that this just isn’t an option. If you only have one or two ‘fussy’ eaters i.e. those people that don’t eat gluten because it makes them sleepy, then don’t worry about catering to them. They don’t want the cake, they leave the cake. More for us. However this just isn’t the case with our guests, so we had to go down a different path.
2) Make the entire menu vegan and gluten free, including the cake. I thought about this option for quite some time, because it is just much easier from an admin perspective. There are some exceptional vegan bakers out there who are so good in fact, that I promise you cant tell the cake is vegan or gluten free. At all.
3) If you only have a handful of dietary requirements to cater to, you could make the top tier of your wedding cake vegan and gluten free. I have done this quite a few times for clients and it has gone down a treat with their guests. The top tier looks no different to the rest of the cake so the aesthetic isn’t ruined, and guests who usually don’t get to eat cake really appreciate the extra effort that has gone in to catering to them. The only problem here is where you have someone with a severe allergy and cross contamination is an issue.
4) If you do have a severe allergy, perhaps consider vegan, gluten free cupcakes. You can even individually box them, to make sure no contaminates get in. This is the option we have decided on for our wedding as for me, it seems the safest way to do it given the amount of allergies and intolerances we are dealing with.
If you have any questions about how to manage dietary requirements when designing your wedding cake, drop me a message on my contact page. I would love to hear from you.