The type of cake this will be depends on your creativity, your baker's skill, and of course, the wedding budget. Tropical wedding cake ideas include adding live, tropical flower to your cake. This is one way to transform an otherwise very basic wedding cake into a tropical wedding cake. Or, your baker can create flowers, fruits, birds, and other tropical ornaments with pliable edible decorations made from sugar paste, marzipan or fondant.
At some point you'll need to decide on flavors for your cake. Here are a few tropical wedding cake ideas for flavors that can be used alone or in varying combinations as your tropical wedding cake or frosting flavor: coconut; banana; lilikoi (Hawaiian passion fruit); rum or banana-rum; mango; lemon; pineapple; guava; macadamia nut. You could also use tropical fruit fillings or cream-and-fruit fillings in between the layers.
If your tropical wedding cake will have more than one tier, it would be nice to have a different flavor for each tier, especially if you're going with flavors rather than plain white cake and buttercream frosting. This will give your guests alternatives if they don't care for, say, mango. If you and your honey love chocolate, this can go well with some of the above flavors.
If your cake contains slivered macadamia nuts, a word of caution is in order. Be careful if you and your new spouse smear cake in each others' faces during the cake-cutting ceremony. A sliver of macadamia nut in the eye can hurt and do some damage.
Now for the fun part: designing your tropical wedding cake! Tropical wedding cake ideas include the use of tropical flowers. These can adorn your cake in several ways. For example:
- Orchids can cascade from the top on a tiered cake.
- Sugar plumerias could be scattered freely on the cake.
- Fresh or bakery-created flowers can form draping leis around each tier.
- Larger tropical flowers such as bird of paradise could be added to fresh-flower holders in between the tiers.
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Just be sure that any flowers or stems with toxins are not in direct contact with your cake. Also be sure to have a cake attendant who will guard the cake from little ones, which you'd want to do anyway to protect it.
Tropical flowers and plants include: Tahitian gardenia, bird of paradise, orchids (in every color of the rainbow), plumeria (creamy yellow, pink, red), ginger, antherium (pink, red or green), bamboo, and ti leaf. If you can't acquire or don't want to use live flowers, find artificial ones that are of high enough quality to look real or at least not tacky. Another option is to have the cake decorator create flowers, such as sugar-paste hibiscus or marzipan plumeria.
Here are a few other elements popular on tropical cakes:- Blue swirls of gel to create waves rising up the sides of each tier.
- Edible shells molded from marzipan.
- Net for shells, created with fine icing.
- Bamboo mat for a "platter."
- Ti-leaf bows.
- Toasted, grated coconut on white buttercream for a sandy look.
- Blue or turquoise "water" on the part of each tier that isn't covered by the smaller one on top.
- Strings of pearls.
- Miniature marzipan pineapples, bananas, etc.
- Bamboo outlining an angular cake or tier.
