Is a (British) wedding cake just a tiered fruit cake

These days, wedding cakes can be pretty much any kind of cake. A traditional wedding cake is certainly more or less a Christmas cake - a dense, dark, 'matured' fruit cake with marzipan and royal icing.

However, nowadays you will find that anything goes - flavoured sponges are extremely popular. The main criteria is that the cake should be sufficiently dense to hold the weight of a tier or two. This means your standard light-as-air Victoria Sponge won't cut it - it will just collapse. You need to be looking at denser, moister cakes.

Basically, a wedding cake is whatever the happy couple want it to be!

Traditions for wedding cakes have varied so much over time and throughout the Pretanic Isles as to make "the tradition" impossible to settle on.

Having different cakes for different tiers is both long-standing and popular today, as well as being of practical benefit (having a relatively solid cake like chocolate-biscuit at the bottom for example).

Fruit cakes go back to the when Bride's Pie stopped being savoury, and have secondary traditions associated with them (its sometimes done to store the smallest cake layer in brandy and use it as a Christening cake for the first child born to the couple) which may make it a particularly desired choice. It's common to have it in the mix for that reason. A cake like Delia Smith's Christmas cake would certainly be in line with that.

Of course, one of the oldest wedding traditions is that everything about the celebration is "bride's choice", of which the modern version is that it's all up to the couple. That overrides everything else.

My Partner used to be a pro wedding cake maker and I've helped her do a few over the years for friends and family.

The tiers can be any cake these days, but only a fruit cake is dense enough to support tiers above it without dowels, use of a cake stand neatly gets around this.

It used to be a tradition that the top (smallest) tier would be a fruit cake that would be kept until the christening or birth of the first child. For the cake to keep it would need to be a fruit cake and carefully iced so that it is sealed to the cake board to keep air out.

If tradition is important then also consider royal icing, hard work and most people would be surprised to hear that the cake had been sanded down between layers!

I know the Delia recipe that you are talking of and have made it numerous times because it tastes great :-) use light muscavado sugar to keep the taste of treacle from being too strong. It scales up with no problem at all but fruit cake mixture is hard work to stir be careful not to overload even a strong mixer or your arm.

Another thing that wedding guests often don't realise is that there is far more cake than they saw being cut; It is really common for slabs of cake to be supplied, they will be iced to match the displayed cake but without decoration. This way the tiered cake could be all fruit but there can be many other types / flavours of cake for the guests who because of the icing never knew what was in the tiers.