My Love Affair with Cake Toppers (and the Tragic Rise of the Cupcake)
- Alan Mostov
- Aug 20
- 26 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Cupcakes may be convenient, delicious, and wonderfully easy to serve, but I remain convinced they cost weddings something more important than anyone realized. For decades, I’ve watched wedding cakes shrink, dessert tables expand, and one of my favorite little pieces of wedding personality slowly disappear along the way: the cake topper. From buttercream permanently attached to my mustache to the five-tiered cake Gail and I smashed into each other’s faces, this is my love letter to an impractical, occasionally inappropriate, wonderfully personal tradition—and the tiny objects that once told you something about a couple before they ever said a word.
August 20, 2026
The Buttercream Occupation
Cupcakes are proof that whoever invented them was clean shaven.
I don't know who first looked at a perfectly respectable wedding cake and thought, "You know what this needs? Hundreds of tiny individual versions that cling to facial hair with the tenacity of industrial epoxy." But I'd be willing to wager every dollar in my wallet that he couldn't grow a beard if his life depended on it.
Now, before the cupcake enthusiasts sharpen their pitchforks—and I know you're out there because some of you have probably already drafted an angry email defending the honor of buttercream—allow me to clarify my position. I don't hate cupcakes. They're delicious. They're convenient. They're portable. They come in approximately 437 flavors, every color found in nature, and several colors that probably shouldn't exist outside of a chemistry lab. But they possess one fatal design flaw that no engineer apparently thought to address.
They are a weapon of mass facial destruction.
Every bearded man knows exactly what happens next. You peel away the wrapper, trying to be civilized. You take one careful bite because you're in public and you're a professional. Then, somewhere between your mouth and the cupcake, the frosting attaches itself to your mustache like it just closed on a thirty-year mortgage. It doesn't merely land there. It moves in. It establishes permanent residency.
Naturally, your first instinct is to wipe it away with your fingers. Congratulations. Your fingers are now blue. The frosting remains comfortably nestled in your mustache. So you wipe your fingers on a napkin. Now the napkin is blue. Your fingers are still blue. Your mustache is still blue. The frosting has merely expanded its sphere of influence.
You try another finger. Same result. Another napkin. Same result. At some point you realize you're no longer cleaning anything. You're simply redistributing frosting throughout the local ecosystem.
As a wedding DJ, maintaining a certain level of professionalism matters. It's difficult to project confidence when you're introducing the father-daughter dance while unknowingly wearing enough neon-colored frosting to qualify as a birthday decoration. Somewhere across the room, the photographer has captured the most important moments of the evening. Meanwhile, I'm wondering if I look like I lost a fistfight with a Smurf.
Eventually, every bearded wedding professional arrives at the same conclusion: this battle cannot be won from behind the DJ booth. The only solution is a trip to the restroom, where you stand over the sink scrubbing your mustache with soap and warm water while silently questioning every decision that led to this moment. Meanwhile, guests are walking toward the DJ booth with song requests, the photographer is looking for you to coordinate the next event, and somewhere in the ballroom another innocent cupcake is preparing to claim its next victim.
The truly tragic part is that cupcakes arrived just as the wedding industry finally figured out wedding cake.
Dessert on Standard Wedding Time
When I first started DJing weddings, the tiered wedding cake was still a fixture of virtually every reception. And I'm not talking about the little six-inch "cutting cake" you sometimes see today, sitting almost apologetically on a table while its far less glamorous sheet-cake cousin waits backstage in the kitchen. I mean a wedding cake. Three tiers. Four tiers. Five tiers. Cakes stacked on top of cakes, sometimes separated by pillars, flowers, fountains, staircases, ribbons, and enough buttercream to patch drywall. They were big. They were expensive. They were unapologetically wedding cakes, and they didn't get tucked into some dark corner of the room. They were displayed. Sometimes under their own spotlight. You noticed the cake when you walked into the reception because you were supposed to notice the cake.
And then we spent half the night refusing to eat it.
I have no idea why.
This was simply what we did. Dinner would end and the cake would remain standing there completely untouched. The best man and maid of honor would give their toasts. The couple might make their rounds to the tables. Eventually I'd invite everyone to the dance floor. The bride and groom would dance. Dad would dance with his daughter. Mom would dance with her son. The wedding party would join them. The dance floor would open. I'd start playing music. Guests would head to the bar. Jackets would come off. Ties would loosen. Shoes would begin appearing underneath tables.
And still...
The cake sat there.
An hour might pass. Sometimes more.
Meanwhile, the reception was beginning its natural nightly migration toward the exits. Grandma had kissed the bride goodnight and was putting on her coat. Grandpa was already waiting by the door. The couple with the toddler had reached the point where no amount of negotiation was going to prevent an imminent meltdown. An aunt and uncle with an hour drive home were quietly making their rounds saying goodbye. Empty chairs began appearing around tables. Half-finished drinks were abandoned beside centerpieces. The crowd was getting smaller.
And over in the corner stood enough cake to feed every single person who had just left.
Nobody questioned this.
Certainly not me. I was the DJ. If the photographer said it was time to cut the cake, I announced the cake cutting. If the photographer said we'd do it later, we did it later. For all I knew, there was some ancient wedding law requiring dessert to remain untouched until half the guest list was safely on the interstate. Gail and I weren't any smarter when we got married. We waited to cut ours, too. That was simply the order of things. You ate dinner at six and dessert sometime around the point when normal human beings would be considering a second dinner.
The waste could be astonishing. Remember, these weren't inexpensive desserts. Even when I was starting out, couples could easily spend $500 or $600 on one of those elaborate tiered cakes. The baker had created enough servings for the guest count. The couple had paid for enough servings for the guest count. There were enough servings for the guest count.
There just wasn't a guest count anymore.
By the time somebody finally approached that beautiful cake with a knife, dozens of the people it was intended to feed could already have been home in pajamas.
Which is how I discovered one of the stranger perks of being a wedding DJ in the 1990s.
I wasn't sent home with a slice of cake.
I was sent home with a cake.
Not a little Styrofoam clamshell containing one sad piece of vanilla cake with the icing mashed against the lid. I'm talking about somebody walking up to me near the end of the reception carrying a cardboard bakery box large enough that I needed both hands to take it.
"Do you want some cake?"
Sure.
Then they'd open the box.
There was a tier in it.
A whole damn cake.
This didn't happen once. It happened regularly. There I'd be at one o'clock in the morning, sweaty and exhausted, coiling cables and putting speakers back into cases after a six-hour reception, and someone would hand me enough leftover wedding cake to celebrate another moderately sized wedding. I'd carry it out to the car along with my equipment, trying to find some perfectly level piece of floor where several pounds of buttercream wouldn't slide sideways on the drive home. Then I'd arrive home ridiculously late carrying a cake that had probably cost more than some of the equipment I'd used when I first started DJing.
My family loved wedding season.
The absurdity wasn't really the amount of cake. The absurdity was that there had been a room full of people perfectly capable of eating it. We had simply waited until many of them were gone before giving them the opportunity.
Then, somewhere around fifteen years ago, the collective wedding world finally experienced a breakthrough of almost breathtaking intellectual complexity:
Dessert is a course of dinner.
Who knew?
Instead of allowing the cake to spend the next ninety minutes standing alone in the corner like a kid nobody asked to dance, couples started cutting it shortly after they finished eating. And suddenly everything worked. The guests were still sitting at their tables. The people who had been hired to serve food were—remarkably—still in the building. Plates were available. Forks were available. The caterers could cut the cake, plate it, and put a piece in front of everyone before anyone had a chance to start making excuses about the drive home.
Nobody had to track down the bride's aunt at 9:30 and hand her a knife. Nobody had to ask a bridesmaid who had already kicked off her shoes and ordered her third drink to spend the next half hour cutting 150 pieces of cake. Nobody had to interrupt a packed dance floor because we suddenly remembered the giant dessert sitting untouched across the room.
We had solved it.
After decades of doing something that made almost no practical sense whatsoever, we had finally figured out exactly when and how to serve a wedding cake.
And almost immediately...
everybody quit buying the damn things.
She Starts It
Maybe not everybody. Tiered wedding cakes certainly haven't become extinct. I still see them. But somewhere along the way, the magnificent four-tiered centerpiece that once seemed as essential to a wedding reception as the first dance began losing ground to cupcakes, cookies, donuts, brownies, pies, cheesecake bites, dessert bars, candy tables, and assorted collections of tiny things served in tiny glasses with tiny spoons. The towering wedding cake became a two-tiered cake. Then a single-tiered cake. Then a small "cutting cake" surrounded by cupcakes. Then, at some weddings, the cake disappeared altogether.
I understand why.
Really, I do.
Cupcakes don't need to be cut. Cookies don't require plates and forks. A dessert bar gives guests choices. Someone who hates chocolate can grab a lemon bar. Someone who doesn't want cake can have a cannoli. Someone who wants six different desserts can apparently spend the rest of the evening making increasingly questionable decisions while insisting that each trip to the dessert table is "just to see what they have left." There are practical advantages to all of it, and I'm certainly not going to tell a couple that they should spend hundreds of dollars on a giant cake simply because that's what people did thirty years ago.
But something disappeared along with those cakes.
Actually, several things did.
A wedding cake used to be a moment.
You didn't simply eat it. You gathered around it. The photographer positioned the couple behind it. Guests stood nearby with cameras raised. The bride and groom placed their hands together on the knife and tried to make one reasonably attractive cut while being given conflicting instructions by four different people. There was usually some uncertainty about exactly how one was supposed to extract a piece from the hole they had just carved into a perfectly good cake. Then came the ceremonial feeding, accompanied by the inevitable question hanging over the entire room:
Are they going to smash it?
Every groom in America has already been warned. Usually repeatedly. Don't you dare. I spent too much money on my makeup. If you get cake in my hair, you're a dead man. The groom nods solemnly because he understands that his marriage is approximately six hours old and this is probably not the ideal moment to begin testing its structural integrity. He cuts the cake, picks up the smallest possible piece, and approaches his new wife's mouth with the care of a bomb technician deciding which wire to cut. But…wait for it…
As he tries to guide that single, microscopic crumb past her pristine lipstick with the agonizing diligence of a neurosurgeon in a high-stakes operating room, the trap springs shut. He is entirely focused on his mission of survival, his defenses completely lowered by his own careful compliance, which makes it the absolute perfect moment for his beautiful new bride to abandon all her previous death threats and launch a swift, unprovoked missile of frosting directly into his unsuspecting face. It turns out that all those pre-wedding warnings were not a treaty, but a tactical distraction, leaving the groom standing there in a ruined tuxedo, blinking through layers of buttercream, and learning his very first lesson in marital warfare: she starts it almost every damn time. I realize this is a dangerous accusation for a man who has spent nearly three decades working primarily for brides to put into writing, but I have witnesses. I have watched brides spend the entire week threatening bodily harm if their new husbands so much as contemplated smashing cake into their faces, only to wait until the groom has completely lowered his defenses and then launch the first strike themselves. More importantly, I have personal experience.
At our own wedding, Gail was twenty years old; I was twenty-six. One of my groomsmen, my friend Scott Gross, was standing behind me while we cut the cake. I couldn't see him, but Gail could, and Scott was doing what any loyal friend and responsible member of a wedding party would do at such an important moment in another man's life: he was trying to convince my new wife to assault me with dessert. Over my shoulder, he was repeatedly mouthing the words "SMASH IT" while pantomiming the maneuver he wanted her to perform. I remained blissfully unaware of the conspiracy until I looked at Gail's face and realized something had changed. Her left eyebrow went up. Her lips formed a smile that was equal parts coquettish and sinister. I could practically see the debate happening behind her eyes: on one side was the sweet young bride who loved the man standing in front of her and had just promised to spend the rest of her life with him; on the other was the impressionable twenty-year-old girl, easily swayed and apparently willing to succumb to
peer pressure despite the repercussions.
Before I could object, she smashed the cake onto my bald head. In retrospect, I appreciate her choice of target. She avoided the beard entirely, and from a cleanup perspective, the top of my head is essentially a nonstick surface. A napkin, a little water, perhaps a quick buff, and I was back in business. Had she gone for the mustache, we'd probably have missed half the reception while I stood over a restroom sink trying to convince buttercream to sell the property it had moved into.
What happened next was not one of my finer moments. I wish I could say I demonstrated the maturity one might reasonably expect from the twenty-six-year-old in this particular exchange. I wish I could tell you that I laughed, wiped the frosting from my head, kissed my beautiful new bride, and accepted defeat with dignity. I really do. Well...mostly. She had it coming. My retaliation wasn't planned; it was an entirely reflexive, flinchingly knee-jerk response. Her hand came down on my head, and almost simultaneously, mine went up into her face. Unfortunately for Gail, my aim was considerably worse—or better, depending upon your perspective. I had frosting on a smooth, easily washable surface. Gail apparently inhaled hers. My hand landed in her nose.
And when I say in her nose, I mean in her nose. Gail spent the rest of our reception wiping frosting from her nostrils, and apparently some of it had ventured far enough north to establish its own little buttercream colony somewhere in her sinus cavities. Even days later, on our honeymoon, the cake occasionally reminded us that it had come along for the trip.
She was frosty, but she wasn't an ice queen. We were newlyweds, after all, and passionate enough beneath the palm trees and among the dunes on the Cape. She was the love I had looked for, and together we had made our escape. But there we were, beginning married life in paradise, and between the piña coladas my beautiful new bride was still sneezing wedding cake.
Twenty-six years and hundreds of weddings later, I can assure you that Gail was hardly an anomaly. When that little piece of cake is raised toward someone's mouth, there is often a moment when you can actually see temptation enter the room. A smile changes. An eyebrow lifts. The hand hesitates just a fraction too long. Suddenly, the photographer is ready, the wedding party is chanting, and somebody makes a very bad decision. What fascinates me is how often that somebody is the bride. The groom, after receiving dire warnings about protecting hair, makeup, eyelashes, and possibly the continued viability of the marriage itself, approaches the moment like he's handling nitroglycerin.
Meanwhile, his new wife is discovering that buttercream looks remarkably throwable. And when she gives in to temptation, I swear the target is disproportionately likely to be a man with facial hair. I watch that handful of frosting disappear into another groom's beard. So there I am across the room, still traumatized from my own cupcake encounter, watching another bearded man discover that frosting possesses adhesive properties not adequately explained by modern science. He looks across the room at the bearded DJ. Our eyes meet. No words are necessary. We understand one another completely. I've fought this war before, brother. You're going to need soap.
For the record, I am not encouraging cake smashing. I am also not particularly offended by it. I possess the sense of humor of a twelve-year-old boy, and a well-executed food fight is going to make me laugh. Every time. Besides, couples today can prepare for cake combat with a level of sophistication previously reserved for hazardous-material cleanup. Etsy will happily sell you personalized Mr. and Mrs. bibs, ponchos, face shields, hair coverings, and probably full tactical buttercream armor if you're willing to scroll long enough. You can apparently smash cake into your spouse's face in 2026 without actually getting cake on your spouse's face. Technology is remarkable.
But for all the fun I've had watching couples feed—and occasionally ambush, pummel, clobber, attack, wallop, or cream (pun intended)—one another with wedding cake through the years, the cake cutting itself isn't really what I miss. I miss the cake being something worth walking across the room to admire. I miss the spectacle of it. I miss the way a towering cake could command its own little corner of a reception hall before anyone ever picked up a knife. And, more than anything else, I miss one small piece of personality that used to sit at the very top.
Because long before anyone ate the cake, I was already looking at it.
Six Inches Higher
Long before the guests arrive at a reception, I usually have the room mostly to myself. The caterers are working. The bartenders are stocking bottles. Florists might still be making adjustments. I'm running cables, testing microphones, checking sound, and preparing for the evening. There is a peculiar window of time before a wedding reception begins when a ballroom is completely finished but hasn't quite come alive yet. The chairs are perfectly straight. The napkins are still folded exactly as someone intended. Every place setting is untouched. Candles haven't burned down. Nobody has abandoned a half-empty drink beside a centerpiece or kicked off a pair of heels beneath a table. Months of planning are sitting there, pristine and waiting for a hundred or two hundred people to come through the doors and mess it all up.
Once my equipment is ready, I have a little time to look around, and I always do. I notice things. I look at the centerpieces. I read the little signs. I notice the photographs placed around the room and the names assigned to tables. I look at favors, memorial displays, guest books, seating charts, flowers, and all of those little choices a couple spent months making that most guests will absorb in about thirty seconds while trying to figure out where they're sitting. Those details tell stories. Sometimes they're elegant. Sometimes they're funny. Sometimes they're intensely personal. And sometimes they're little more than something a wedding magazine or Pinterest convinced everyone they were supposed to have.
Back when tiered wedding cakes were the norm, though, there was one place I almost always wandered eventually: the cake table. Part of that was simply because the cakes were impossible to ignore. They were designed to be noticed. But I wasn't especially interested in counting the tiers or inspecting the piping, and I certainly wasn't trying to determine whether the frosting was buttercream or fondant. I have probably spent more time looking at the tops of wedding cakes than most bakers, but while everyone else admired the flowers, the tiers, the frosting, or whatever architectural miracle was preventing several dozen pounds of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter from collapsing under its own weight, I was usually looking about six inches higher.
I wanted to see the cake topper.
God, I love cake toppers.
I have photographed them for years. Not because I ever had a plan for the photographs. There was no cake-topper scrapbook waiting at home. I wasn't documenting them for some future scholarly examination of matrimonial pastry ornamentation. I just liked them. I'd see one that made me laugh, or one that was particularly beautiful, or clever, or weird. And for every cake topper, I'd pull out my phone and take a picture.
And I've seen everything.
I've seen the traditional bride and groom standing perfectly upright together, looking impossibly elegant and approximately nothing like the actual bride and groom. I've seen golfers, fishermen, hunters, motorcycles, sports fans, superheroes, Disney characters, dinosaurs, dragonslayers, Lego block creations, Star Wars characters, even Bigfoot and his blushing Bigfoot bride, because apparently even Sasquatch eventually finds his soul mate. I've seen brides dragging reluctant grooms toward the altar, grooms attempting to escape, and still others weighed down by a literal ball and chain. I've seen pets incorporated into the scene because apparently even in miniature form the dog still needed to be part of the wedding. I've seen custom figurines made to resemble the couple so closely that you could identify them without seeing the actual people standing ten feet away. Some have been romantic. Some have been ridiculous. Some have been beautiful, and others wonderfully tacky. And yes, I've seen several that were spectacularly inappropriate. Those X-rated toppers are memorable, too—maybe especially those.
The thing is, whether the topper was elegant, hilarious, sentimental, nerdy, mildly questionable, or something that probably should have been covered with a tiny towel before Grandma approached the cake table, it told me something. Before I had introduced the couple, before I had played their first dance, and sometimes before I had even met them, two little figures standing on top of a cake had already told me exactly what the couple wanted everyone to know: This is us.
And I loved that.
More Than Decoration
The more I think about it, the more I realize that cake toppers occupied a rather extraordinary place in a wedding reception. Nearly everything else in the room had a job to do. The tables and chairs gave people somewhere to sit. The seating chart told them where. The centerpieces dressed up the tables, the flowers carried the colors through the room, the guest book recorded who had been there, and the favors gave everyone something to take home. Even the wedding cake itself had the rather important responsibility of eventually becoming dessert. But the cake topper? It didn't need to do anything. It didn't feed anyone, direct anyone, illuminate anything, hold anything together, or make the reception function more efficiently. It existed almost entirely for expression. Couples were given a few square inches of otherwise useless real estate and invited to put something there that represented them. That apparent uselessness may have been precisely what made the topper so meaningful.
There was no practical reason to put an Iron Throne on a wedding cake. Nobody's evening was improved logistically because Mario and Princess Peach were standing above the frosting. Roger Rabbit and Jessica didn't help anyone find Table Nine, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon contributed absolutely nothing to the efficient operation of dinner service. I've seen deer, alligators, eggs and bacon holding hands, tiki scenes, video-game worlds, horror imagery, and an anatomically correct human heart incorporated into wedding cakes. I've seen a miniature bride walking her groom on a leash and another groom clinging desperately to the side of a cake. In some cases, calling these things cake toppers almost seems inadequate because the idea didn't stop at the top. The couple's personality spilled down the tiers. The entire cake became the joke, the fandom, the hobby, the reference, or the story. The cake wasn't merely decorated for a wedding anymore. It had been claimed.
And that distinction matters to me because there is a difference between decorating something and identifying yourself with it. A wedding color is a preference. A flavor is a preference. An arrangement of flowers can be a preference. But nobody accidentally puts the Creature from the Black Lagoon on a wedding cake. Somewhere along the way, two people looked at that thing and decided that, of all the images they could place in the middle of one of the most photographed displays at their reception, that belonged there. Maybe it represented something they loved together. Maybe it was an inside joke. Maybe it referenced the movie they watched on their first date or the game they spent hundreds of hours playing side by side. Maybe there was a wonderfully elaborate story behind it. Maybe they simply thought it was hilarious. I didn't always know, and I didn't need to know. Whatever the explanation, the choice belonged unmistakably to them.
That's the part I think can get lost when we talk about "personalizing" weddings today, because personalization and personality aren't necessarily the same thing. We can personalize almost anything now. A couple's names and wedding date can be printed, engraved, projected, embroidered, etched, laser-cut, or applied in vinyl to nearly every stationary object in a reception hall. Fonts can match the invitations. Colors can carry from the save-the-dates to the welcome sign to the seating chart to the menus. Florals can repeat across the room. Table numbers, napkins, favors, bar signs, drink menus, and place cards can all belong to one beautifully coordinated visual language. I've worked in rooms where that attention to detail has been breathtaking. But a wedding can be personalized down to the cocktail napkins and still reveal surprisingly little about the personalities of the two people getting married.
That stupid little cake topper could.
In fact, sometimes it was better when it was stupid. Imagine an immaculate ballroom filled with white roses, candlelight, elegant calligraphy, carefully chosen linens, and months of meticulous planning, only to discover that the expensive wedding cake is being guarded by a dragon or topped by Kermit and Miss Piggy. That little act of rebellion could be the thing that made the entire room suddenly feel human. There they were—not the bride and groom as envisioned by a wedding magazine, not the aesthetic they selected, not the trends that happened to be fashionable that year, but the actual people underneath all the formalwear. Perhaps they were gamers. Horror fans. Disney adults. Hunters. Movie obsessives. Maybe they had a gloriously juvenile sense of humor. Maybe their friends understood the reference instantly while their grandparents remained completely baffled. Either way, perfection had been interrupted by personality, and I have always preferred personality.
That doesn't mean I think personal expression has disappeared from weddings. Far from it. Couples still find wonderful ways to make celebrations unmistakably their own, and some of the most memorable ideas I've encountered have involved throwing tradition out completely. One of my favorite wedding-cake ideas of all time came sometime in the early 2000s, when a couple decided that instead of having one enormous cake displayed somewhere in the reception hall, they would put a cake on every table. Each cake became the centerpiece, and each table received a different flavor. Coconut might be sitting at one table, lemon at another, carrot cake somewhere across the room, with red velvet and other flavors scattered among the rest. When the newlyweds cut their cake, the guests were invited to cut the cakes sitting right in front of them.
It was brilliant, and not simply because dessert was already on the table. Nobody had to wait for someone to cut 150 pieces of cake. Nobody had to stand in line. Nobody had to abandon a conversation to make a pilgrimage across the room in search of dessert. But then something even better happened. People started discovering what everybody else had. If you were sitting in front of almond cake but wanted German chocolate, you had to find the German chocolate. If the people at the next table had strawberry cake and wanted whatever you had, suddenly slices were being traded. Guests got up. They wandered. They asked strangers what flavor was on their table. They sat down with people they hadn't known before that evening and sampled somebody else's cake. Dessert became an icebreaker. The centerpiece became interactive. The cakes gave people a reason to cross all of those invisible little social boundaries that divide a reception into families, friends, coworkers, college buddies, and relatives who haven't seen one another since the last wedding.
I don't remember what those cakes looked like. I couldn't tell you every flavor anymore, and I certainly don't remember what flowers or linens surrounded them. But more than twenty years later, I remember the idea. I remember what happened because of it. That couple didn't preserve the old wedding-cake tradition I grew up with as a DJ. They completely dismantled it and rebuilt it into something that suited their reception better. That's why I don't really want weddings to go backward. I don't need five tiers on columns to make a comeback. I don't need fountains underneath cakes or little staircases connecting satellite tiers. I don't need couples spending hundreds of dollars on enormous desserts simply because somebody decided generations ago that this is what a wedding is supposed to look like. Tradition isn't what I'm defending here. Individuality is.
And perhaps that's why cupcakes make such a convenient villain for this particular story, even if they don't entirely deserve the abuse I've given them. A cupcake can be gorgeous. A cupcake can be delicious. A cupcake can tell me that somebody loves red velvet, salted caramel, lemon, chocolate peanut butter, or enough artificial blue coloring to permanently alter the appearance of my mustache. A cupcake tower can be arranged beautifully enough to stop me in my tracks. But preference and identity are different things. We like chocolate peanut butter tells me what you want for dessert. Link and Princess Zelda guarding your wedding cake tells me something about what you've shared. A xenomorph tells me something. Roger and Jessica tell me something. An anatomical heart sitting where roses ordinarily belong definitely tells me something, although I may have follow-up questions. The prettiest cupcake I've ever seen was still just a cupcake. Those cakes were introductions.
Maybe that's why losing the cake topper bothers me more than losing the towering cake itself. The big cake was impressive, but the little thing sitting on it—or underneath it, beside it, hanging from it, climbing it, or occasionally taking over the entire damn thing—was intimate. The cake announced the wedding. The topper introduced the people having it. And sometimes the smallest, silliest, least necessary object in the entire reception ended up saying more about them than anything else in the room.
The Topper We Still Display
Of course, if I am going to spend this much time defending the cultural importance of tiny objects perched on wedding cakes, I should probably admit that I am hopelessly biased. Gail and I had one of our own, and ours was unmistakably us. Pepe Le Pew and Penelope Cat were the centerpiece of our five-tier wedding cake—or, more accurately, the underpiece. Our topper was a substantial ceramic figure, far too heavy to perch safely on top of five tiers of cake supported by columns. Putting it up there would have transformed our cake cutting into a controlled demolition. Instead, Pepe and Penelope stood beneath the largest tier, holding hands under the cake itself, while matching Pepe and Penelope plush dolls from the old Warner Bros. Studio Store sat on either side. Subtle, we were not. Nobody needed to search very hard for our personalities in that particular corner of the reception hall.
I don't remember exactly when Gail and I decided Pepe and Penelope were going to represent us, and I'm not sure there needs to be some grand romantic explanation for it. We liked them. They amused us. They were part of the pop culture we shared, and when we saw that ceramic figure, it felt right. That's really all a cake topper ever needed to accomplish. It didn't need to summarize our relationship or convey some profound statement about the promises we had just made to one another. We weren't asking a cartoon skunk and cat to explain our marriage. We were twenty-six and twenty years old, choosing something for our wedding that made us smile and felt like ours. Twenty-six years later, the fact that we chose them says something about those two younger versions of us that a generic bride-and-groom figurine never could.
And ours was clearly intended to survive the cake.
That strikes me differently now than it did when we bought it. The thing was made of ceramic. It had weight. It had substance. Somebody manufactured it knowing that no sane person was going to spend that much money on a substantial ceramic figurine, use it for several hours, and throw it into the garbage with the leftover napkins at the end of the reception. It was a cake topper, certainly, but only temporarily. Its first job was to decorate a wedding cake. Its second job was expected to last considerably longer.
Ours has.
Twenty-six years later, Pepe and Penelope sit proudly on our mantle. The five-tier cake they once stood beneath disappeared before our wedding night was over, some of it eaten by our guests and a rather unfortunate quantity apparently taking up temporary residence in Gail's sinuses. The matching plush dolls survived, too, although the Warner Bros. Studio Store where we bought them did not. Those stores disappeared years ago. Hell, even Pepe Le Pew himself has essentially disappeared from contemporary Warner Bros. productions, apparently deemed too problematic for modern audiences. Personally, I think society probably could have survived the continued existence of an amorous cartoon skunk, but nobody consulted me. Yet there he remains on our mantle, eternally holding Penelope's hand, preserved in ceramic from a moment when Gail and I were young enough to think he made the perfect decoration for our wedding cake.
There are objects from a wedding that are deliberately meant to become keepsakes, of course. Couples preserve invitations. They save photographs and videos. Some brides preserve their dresses. People press flowers, frame vows, keep programs, tuck away cards, and save champagne glasses engraved with names and dates. Those things announce their sentimental purpose from the beginning. Nobody is surprised when a wedding album remains on a shelf decades later. That's exactly what it was created to do. A cake topper was stranger than that. It spent the wedding sitting in frosting—or, in our case, underneath several pounds of cake—looking almost frivolous. It was part decoration, part joke, part toy, part miniature sculpture. Yet some of them were made with the expectation that after the flowers wilted, the linens were returned, the centerpieces were dismantled, the cake was eaten, and the reception hall was cleaned for somebody else's wedding, those little figures would go home with the newlyweds.
There is something almost absurdly beautiful about that.
A wedding is filled with enormous things that disappear. Thousands of dollars' worth of flowers may be magnificent for one afternoon. Elaborate centerpieces are dismantled. Candles burn down. Food is eaten. Champagne bottles are emptied. The carefully folded napkins eventually become laundry. The dance floor that seemed like the center of the universe at 10:30 Saturday night is an empty piece of wood by Sunday morning. Even the cake—the towering, expensive, painstakingly decorated centerpiece that started this entire rant—is created with the explicit understanding that people are going to destroy it with knives and forks. So much money, effort, planning, emotion, and anticipation are invested in things whose entire purpose is to exist beautifully for a handful of hours and then disappear.
And sitting among all of it was this silly little object that wasn't going anywhere.
I think that's what I never understood about cake toppers when I was younger and what I understand now after watching so many weddings pass in front of me. They existed in two different worlds. For a few hours, they belonged to the wedding. They stood on the cake beneath the flowers and lights while photographers took pictures of them and guests stopped to look. But afterward, they belonged to the marriage. They went into a box, rode home in a car, emerged days or weeks later, and found somewhere else to live. Maybe a mantle. Maybe a china cabinet. Maybe a bookshelf. Maybe, eventually, a box in the basement until somebody stumbled across it twenty years later and immediately remembered exactly where it once stood.
That is an astonishing amount of meaning for something so unnecessary.
Our Pepe and Penelope don't merely remind me what our cake looked like. I can look at them and see the reception around them. I can see Gail at twenty years old and myself at twenty-six. I can remember Scott standing behind me encouraging crimes against pastry. I can see that eyebrow rise and that wonderfully dangerous smile appear just before a piece of our wedding cake landed on my bald head. I can remember retaliating before good judgment had any opportunity to intervene and sending enough frosting into my new wife's nose that portions of our wedding dessert apparently accompanied us on our honeymoon. The topper doesn't contain those memories, obviously. But memory attaches itself to objects in ways frosting attaches itself to a mustache: stubbornly, completely, and sometimes for far longer than seems reasonable.
Maybe that is what I've really been photographing all these years without realizing it.
Not cake decorations.
Artifacts.
Little objects that captured something about two people at one particular moment in their lives. The dinosaur couple, the superheroes, the bikers, the gamers, the hunters, the horror fans, the hopeless romantics, the people with the dirty joke Grandma wasn't supposed to inspect too closely—all of them chose something that said who they were then. Some of those couples undoubtedly changed. Interests changed. Homes changed. Families grew. Careers came and went. The world around them changed. Some of the cultural references on those cakes probably make considerably less sense today than they did when I photographed them. But somewhere, I hope, at least a few of those ridiculous little figures are still sitting on mantles just like ours.
And that, more than anything, is why I mourn their disappearance.
Not because weddings were better thirty years ago. They weren't. Not because every couple needs a five-tier cake on columns. They don't. Not because cupcakes truly are evil, despite the considerable evidence I have presented as proof. Weddings change because people change, and many of those changes have made receptions easier, more interesting, more inclusive, and far more reflective of the people actually getting married.
But I hope we never become so efficient, polished, coordinated, and practical that we forget to leave room for something wonderfully unnecessary.
Something funny. Something ridiculous. Something romantic. Something inappropriate. Something nobody else understands. Something that doesn't match the flowers or the fonts or the carefully selected aesthetic but matches the two people standing in the middle of all of it.
Something that says, simply and unapologetically, this is us.
Because twenty-six years from now, the cupcakes will be long gone.
But the topper might still be sitting on the mantle.
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