Your wedding cake is a big part of your wedding party. You want your wedding cake to be eco-friendly and special. Here’s how to manage both.
1. Choose organic – supporting organic food is an important green choice. There’s no better time to say you support organics than at your wedding. You can usually ask custom wedding cake bakeries to use organic ingredients, even if they don’t advertise as specifically organic.
2. Go local – locally made, seasonally made cakes and locally acquired ingredients are much greener than shipping in a cake or ingredients. If you’re making your own wedding cake, you can even make filling with berries found at local pick-your-own farms which will also cut down on packaging. A reusable bucket works!
3. Design green – one of the most unique aspects of each wedding cake is the design of course. You can use natural design aspects such as organic candied flowers or fresh organic flowers. You can use safe edible herbs and leaves, pretty branches, or even decorate a wedding cake with reclaimed thrift store jewelry. You can also consider growing some of your own flowers for the cake. Check out this amazing naturally decorated wedding cake!
4. Buy Fair Trade – with a chocolate or nut-based cake, Fair Trade is a green step you can take. Sugar, bananas, berries and many other cake-minded ingredients can also be certified Fair Trade. To learn what’s available in Fair Trade visit Equal Exchange or TransFair.
5. Top it off right – an eco-friendly wedding cake topper is a must and it’s super easy to find one you love. There are tons of choices for sustainable wedding cake toppers out there, such as sugar topper, organic flowers, sustainable wood and more. One green solution is to reuse a topper that a close friend used.
6. Set it up – Make a DIY cake stand or cupcake stand with recycled materials or buy a sustainable cake stand. One eco-friendly route is used, another is to make sure you buy a cake stand you’ll use again.
7. Go vegan – animal-free is very eco-friendly. And yes, even tasty. Some cake bakeries will substitute vegan ingredients if asked or you can make your own vegan wedding cake.
Bella Cupcake Couture offers beautiful cupcake wrappers printed with soy inks on recycled linen paper
8. Go paper free – if making wedding cupcakes, consider zero wrappers; non-stick cupcake pans can be used to bake perfectly paper-free cupcakes. If you really must have cupcake wraps, aim for wraps made with recycled paper.
9. Small & sweet - do you really need a humongous wedding cake? Maybe, if you have a ton of guests, but really consider how big a cake you need before using more resources than necessary. See a wedding cake size planner.
10. Skip it - sometimes no cake is the most eco-friendly. Especially if you skip it with reason. For example, my brother had pie at his wedding (he loves pie). It’s silly to have cake just to meet tradition. You could plan a very cool and eco-friendly dessert table vs. a cake. Desserts rock because many, such as little chocolates or other small baked goods can double as take-home favors.
[top wedding cake image via Flickr user WordRidden]
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