We've all seen flowers, fondant, and piping—but what other decorative additions does the wedding cake world offer? Fruit can be an amazing choice to top your confection, and offer a more delicious take on the traditional English fruitcake.
Both as accents and the main event, fruits can bring texture, color, and zest to your tiers, and they offer the chance to step away from more typical floral designs. On the other hand, fruits pair wonderfully with petals and blooms, and their wide range of colors and shapes lend themselves to a large spread of themes and cake structures.
Keep things simple with sprinklings of berries, or get glitzy with painted, shimmering pears or apples. Between bananas and strawberries or figs and pineapples, the following cakes featuring fresh and faux produce will inspire a fruit-filled dessert table vision.
Gilded Fruit Wedding Cake
Flecks of gold sent the fruit cake topper on this vanilla cake into truly luxe territory.
Wedding Cake Overflowing with Fruit
This couple's Italian wedding featured a beautiful millefoglie, which spilled over with an abundance of gorgeous fruit.
Naked Blackberry Wedding Cake
Cocoa & Fig decked out this (gluten-free!) almond cake with fresh groupings of blackberries.
Strawberry Wedding Pound Cake
Here, an almond-cornmeal TSP pound cake was accented with mascarpone cream and strawberries.
Wedding Carrot Cake with Figs
This couple chose a short carrot cake with an apricot-jam glaze, vanilla buttercream, and juicy figs.
Lemon and Berry Wedding Cake
A heaping pile of berries (strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries) topped this lemon-layered naked cake.
Wedding Cake with Blueberries
Cup&Cake Barcelona created this simple red velvet confection, which was adorned with a fresh touch of blueberries and rosemary.
Blackberry and Pumpkin Wedding Cake
Blackberry purée, cream-cheese frosting, fresh blackberries, flowers, and greenery all accented this pumpkin Katie Made Bakery naked cake.
Vibrant Fig Wedding Cake
Sweet and Saucy Shop contrasted this bright white cake with the colorful punch of sliced figs.
Fruity Faux-Millefoglie Wedding Cake
This fruit-filled Devil's Thumb Ranch cake was made to mimic a traditional italian millefoglie.
Farm-to-Table Wedding Cake
This purple-streaked white wedding cake, designed by Jason Schreiber, features big, flavorful blackberries.
Red and Blue Berry Wedding Cake
Sweet Layers Cakes & Pastries layered vanilla-bean cake and poppy-seed buttercream icing before sprinkling on an assortment of red and blue fruit.
Strawberry and Maracon Wedding Cake
This groom's relatives at Beach Plum Bakery Café made the couple an olive-oil wedding cake, which was ringed with dainty flowers and topped with strawberries and macarons.
Petit Four Wedding Cakes with Kumquat
These mini hexagonal orange pound cakes have a honey glaze, whipped cream, and candied kumquat slices.
Cherry-Coated Wedding Carrot Cake
This caramel-glazed and caramel-frosted carrot cake by The Scootabaker featured garden roses and red cherries.
Mango Slice Wedding Cake
For their tropical destination wedding, this couple had Parrot Cay chefs concoct a thematic confection, which was soaked in rum-punch syrup, layered with jasmine-mango jam, frosted with vanilla and passion-fruit buttercream, and coated in mango slices with a mango-passion glaze.
Lemon-Basil Wedding Cake with Strawberries
Cake Life Bake Shop made this lemon-basil cake with strawberry compote and cream-cheese frosting.
Raspberry Basket Wedding Cake
The basket-like look of this raspberry-filled yellow-and-chocolate cake was made with thin panels of white chocolate.
Plum and Cardamom Wedding Cake
These cardamom-honey cake layers by Cake Life Bake Shop are topped with plum compote and accompanied by torched plums.
Peach and Pear Wedding Cake
This art-inspired masterpiece (influenced by Cezanne's "The Basket of Apples") was designed by Wendy Kromer and featured lemon cake with meringue frosting. The marzipan peaches and pears that topped each layer were filled with nuts, dates, and figs.
Berry and Stacked Cheese Wedding Cake
This couple took an original route, building a cake out of stacked cheeses and topping it with fresh berries and herbs.
Lemon-Thyme Wedding Cake
This lemon-thyme cake has layers of lemon curd and vanilla buttercream, plus candied lemon slices to decorate the exterior.
Sugar and Fig Wedding Cake
A sweet dusting of powdered sugar completes this fig-layered vanilla cake.
Pineapple Upside-Down Wedding Cakes
These single-serving cherry-filled Bundt cakes include "flowers" made from dried pineapple.
Caramel Apple Wedding Cake
Apples have been a symbol of love, fertility, and abundance since ancient Greek times, when the goddess Gaia gave her granddaughter a golden apple tree as a gift at her wedding to Zeus. Golden lady apples, painted with edible gold luster dust, are the focal point of this tower by Betsy Thorleifson of Nine Cakes in Brooklyn, New York. The vanilla-bean spiced apple cake—filled with caramel buttercream—is drizzled with luscious caramel.
Lemon Icebox Wedding Cake
To construct this lemon icebox cake, with its layers of scalloped lemon cookies and honey mascarpone cream, we simply built from the bottom up. Top yours with candied lemon slices for a tangy-sweet cookie cake that will appeal to fickle kids and grown-up foodies alike. (We made the cookies from scratch, but store-bought varieties work just as well; try Moravian Meyer lemon cookies from Salem Baking Co.)
Tropical Fruit Wedding Cake
These yellow-cake layers are brushed with rum syrup and filled with passion-fruit curd and rum-and-vanilla-bean buttercream, while the top of each tier is spread with more passion-fruit curd. Hibiscus flowers, lychees, coconut, mini pineapple and bananas, and tamarillo crown the cake. Pressing a straw mat into the ivory fondant produces the textured appearance. Serve with a slice of fruit such as star fruit, and coconut sorbet.
Strawberry and Floral Wedding Cake
Whimsical and sweet, this cake—with its gum-paste fruits and flowers atop white fondant—is a not-too-classic Bavarian style. A basket filled with tiny strawberries tops off the countryside-chic creation.
Pyramides de Sorbet
This sweet ice-cream cake is simply spectacular. Each of the realistic fruits, which cover an edible nougatine cone, is molded from refreshing sorbet.
Meyer Lemon Wedding Cake
This confection is composed of layers of Meyer lemon-flavored cake, lemon curd, and coconut Swiss-meringue buttercream. Curls of fresh coconut and candied lemon peel form the ruffled flounces on the tiers.
Berry and Ladyfinger Wedding Cake
Here, feather-light ladyfingers surround a filling of raspberry mousse, raspberries, and fraises des bois, or wild strawberries, on soft almond biscuits. More berries and a drizzle of raspberry preserve crown the tiers.
Chocolate Kumquat Wedding Cake
Consider this cake for a wintertime wedding, when the tiny citrus fruit is in season. Tart kumquats are candied and served on the side. Their syrup is brushed on the oval tiers of chocolate cake, which are covered in whipped ganache, then surrounded by bands of tempered bittersweet chocolate. The bands are adorned with flowers cut from kumquat skins and with leaves and flourishes piped in dark and white chocolate.
Grape and Pear Wedding Cake
A Tuscan-style cake with Swiss meringue buttercream is garnished with champagne grapes and Seckel pears. A cake stand of stoneware is supported by dowels inside the bottom tier. The display includes fall foliage, plums, and walnuts; the cake is served with Italian nougat candies.
Wedding Cake with Orange and Red Fruits
This square buttercream wedding cake is adorned with apples, peaches, pears, plums, and currants to soften its edges and give it a charming appeal.
Chocolate-Lemon Wedding Cake
Royal-icing latticework gives this grand cake a summery feel, but the year-round appeal of citrus fruit makes it right for any season. The lemons are actually tinted white chocolate, the blossoms are made of gum paste, and the leaves are white fondant.
Strawberry Shortcake Wedding Cake
Fresh strawberries top stacked pound cakes instead of traditional shortcake biscuits, while mascarpone cream is sandwiched between the layers.
Basket of Berries Wedding Cake
Early summer is the best time to choose a cake like this one, which is brimming with a fresh and varied assortment of the season's best berries. Red currants, raspberries, gooseberries, blueberries, and strawberries look beautiful jumbled together on basket-weave tiers (created using an oversize leaf tip). The cake's three tiers are supported by wooden dowels; the berries are arranged before the dowels are inserted, which helps hide the supports.
Millenery Lemon Wedding Cake
Just try to resist this delightful cake enhanced by a zesty lemon curd filling. Natural and yellow buttercream were piped from the same bag to create the ombré latticework. A topper of silk flowers and millinery lemons makes this perfect for a casual garden wedding.
Cherry-Almond Wedding Cake
Cherries and almonds are close botanical relatives, and they're famously compatible in desserts. Here, they meld lusciously in a three-tier cake cloaked in marzipan (a sweet almond paste) and scattered with marzipan cherries. Sour-cherry jam and buttercream top layers made with ground almonds.
Asian Fruit Wedding Cake
Designs from Asian ceramics inspired the gum-paste pomegranates and persimmons that adorn this fondant-covered cake.
Green Pear Wedding Cake
This octagonal fondant-covered cake has mini marzipan pears with vanilla-bean stems.