Give your cake a splash of whimsy. Order up a fondant cake, plus a bucket of fondant, from a bakery. Add food coloring to the fondant to get the right hues, and roll out into a thin sheet. Cut with various teardrop-shaped cookie cutters, let dry, and attach to the front of the cake with gum paste mixed with hot water. Cookie-cutter set, Ateco, Sur La Table.

Delight guests at a wedding or shower with their own tiered "cake." For these fudge treats, which can be made with white or dark chocolate, cookie cutters form bite-size layers resembling those on a wedding cake. Pink sanding sugar serves as icing, and paper doilies enhance the dainty display.

Architectural yet intimate, our white-chocolate panel cake requires neither culinary talents nor design skills (other than the ones you learned in preschool). Just order a buttercream cake from a local bakery and a pack of chocolate panels from chocolatier Christopher Norman. The rest is a cakewalk: Adhere panels of varying heights onto the tiers, and fill the ledges with golden raspberries or another fruit. Cake panels, $400 for 100 panels, Christopher Norman Chocolates New York, 212-402-1243.

As fun to make as it is to eat, our sparkling marmalade-candy cake takes a little muscle -- and that's about it. Buy your favorite hard candies, place them in a large resealable plastic bag, get a rolling pin, and have a blast pounding away your prewedding jitters. Then press the glittering crushed pieces to the sides of a buttercream cake. Orange hard candy, La Vie de La Vosgienne, amazon.com.

The quiet shimmer of white sweets gives this cake a romantic air. The candies are scattered across tiers dusted in sparkling sugar. The sweets include rock candy, gumdrops, almond drages, wafers, chocolate candies, and more. For the cake topper, we selected a dish made of a barley candy. If you want to use a china dish, which is much heavier, insert three or four dowels into the top tier of the cake to support it.

To construct our irresistible lemon icebox cake, with its layers of scalloped lemon cookies and honey mascarpone cream, we simply built from the bottom up. Top 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 a store-bought version will work just as well; try Moravian Meyer lemon cookies, Salem Baking Co.).

Fancy: Yes. Fussy: Not in the least. To make these mini chocolate-covered desserts, we poured a glaze over each cake and piped on lines -- and, in the case of the cake in the middle, circles -- of melted white chocolate. (Perch the cakes on a wire rack so excess glaze doesn't pool.) Then we gently dragged a toothpick through the lines to create the designs.

This chic confection features black lace licorice wrapped around pristine tiers covered in fondant. We set it on a painted wooden cake board that's 16 inches in diameter and 3/4 inch thick. You'll need a fine-tip natural-bristle paintbrush to attach the licorice laces.

This happy rose confection may look couture, but just about anyone is capable of re-creating it. Start with a plain fondant cake from a bakery. Next, print out our template of abstract roses, place parchment paper over it, and trace with a piping bag of royal icing. Once dry, peel the paper from the piped roses, and adhere the designs to the cake using gum paste that's been mixed with hot water.

Hidden beneath a gentle flurry of bittersweet chocolate curls are three tiers of mocha spice cake made tender with sour cream. The cake gets a lift from coffee, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves: each layer is brushed with ginger-infused syrup before it is frosted with chocolate buttercream. The edible sugar pansies make the cake lovely for a springtime wedding, but the curls are too delicate to be placed outdoors in summertime. The spices are also right for fall and winter.

Buttercream baskets brim with crystallized flowers, including pansies, roses, lavender, cornflowers, and violets. Sugaring flowers gives them a sparkling appearance; if you want guests to be able to nibble on these lovely decorations, be sure to acquire them from a reputable supplier. If you wish to make them yourself, check the edibility of each variety of flower. This cake should be assembled at the reception site, as it is quite tall and may tip over in transit.

Inspired by the classic fruit cake, a heart-shaped cake that's all about chocolate (far right) has whisky-soaked raisins studding its interior; it sits on candied orange slices.

These cakes are sure to recall the joys of summer. Fresh strawberries top stacked pound cakes instead of the traditional biscuits; mascarpone cream is sandwiched between the layers. For an easy-to-slice texture, almond paste and cornmeal were mixed into the batter. Platters piped with royal icing in a basket-weave pattern lend a country feel; they sit on ribbon-wrapped columns that elevate the dessert from its rustic origins and allude to the shape of a conventional tiered wedding cake.

Call this a novel idea -- sparked not by the love story between a vintage book's covers but by the free-form design on the sheets pasted inside. The pattern is done in aqua-tinted white chocolate using chocolate transfer sheets applied to buttercream. The treat inside combines moist dark-chocolate cake, dark-chocolate ganache, and semisweet- and white-chocolate buttercreams.

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.

Shown at bottom left, this cake has four layers of fruit-studded buttermilk cake and blackberry buttercream, which are encased in fondant, a decorative sugar paste that helps keep the interior moist.

The icing on this coffee-infused cake starts out light and becomes deepest in color and flavor at the bottom. The meringue kisses, tinted with cocoa and coffee extract, are dipped in chocolate, then set on the tiers. Extras can be served alongside the cake or distributed as wedding favors.

The Lady Baltimore cake (left) became popular when Owen Wister described it in his 1906 novel, "Lady Baltimore." Typically, the layer cake has a white frosting and a filling that contains chopped nuts and dried fruits. The Lady Baltimore wedding cake is accented with almonds and Swiss meringue fleurs-de-lis; the top tier rests on a milk-glass compote.

Bakers have been swirling dark and light batters together for more than a hundred years. Here, marbleized fondant hints at the cake's interior and covers a layer of buttercream frosting. The fondant's soft-pink hue contrasts with the scalloped chocolate bands, charmingly dressed with grosgrain ribbons and silk bows. Inside are actually two kinds of cake, chocolate marble and mocha marble, in alternating layers; the espresso in the mocha brings extra sophistication to the combination of flavors.

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. Use your favorite yellow, white, or chocolate cake recipe.

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 ombre latticework. A topper of silk flowers and millinery lemons makes this perfect for a casual garden wedding.

Look up "peachy" and you'll see "splendid" -- which perfectly describes this fondant-covered wedding cake in ladylike shades. Just as prim and pretty: the trim of royal-icing pearls, picot-edged ribbons (they are adhered to the sides with royal icing and must be removed before slicing), and ribbon-flower topper.

This tower of truffles is inspired by the croquembouche, the traditional French wedding cake. The chocolates are rolled in assorted cocoa powders from the United States, France, and Holland. The different qualities of the powders provide nuances of color and flavor. Beneath them are layers of yellow butter cake that are filled and frosted with a dense, dark ganache.

This terraced garden with scalloped tiers is in full bloom with spring's first flowers: hyacinths, tulips, daffodils, and muscari. The tiny blue muscari blossoms are piped in royal icing; all the other flowers and leaves are rendered in gum paste. We had a board custom-cut to the same scalloped oval shape as the cake; you could use an oval or rectangular board as well.

Pink gerbera daisies are the inspiration for this lively cake. The flowers are piped in royal icing; a single plump icing daisy serves as the topper. The royal-icing daisies can be made up to three weeks in advance. Since they are very fragile, be sure to store them in a secure place where they are not likely to be jostled, and attach them to the cake only after it has been moved to the reception site.

A floral cake can be flamboyant or quite restrained. The stylized reliefs on this stacked cake are sculpted from marzipan, using traditional German cookie forms called springerle molds; the central medallion depicts a bride and groom emerging from a sunflower. Piped-icing borders artfully hide the seams between panels.

An almond-paved dacquoise cake has rich crunchy almond meringue, chocolate ganache, and thin layers of cake inside. Here, second from left, it is festooned with a tuile cookie. This cake requires three separate recipes to be prepared in advance: a dacquoise, a genoise, and a whipped-chocolate ganache.

Five tiers of dense double-chocolate brownies are glazed with caramel and trimmed with candied pecans. An acrylic pole keeps the tiers aligned; pieces of acrylic tubing slipped over the pole separate the tiers. Vanilla ice cream is served alongside. Use a custom-designed acrylic cake stand to support the brownie tiers.

A creation that is tropical through and through. The yellow-cake layers are brushed with rum syrup and filled with passion-fruit curd and rum-and-vanilla-bean buttercream. 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.

Hidden beneath the swooping white frosting of this tiered dessert are stunning scarlet layers infused with buttermilk and cocoa. Red velvet cake, whose namesake hue comes from food coloring, is a favorite dessert in the South, but its exact origins are unknown. In honor of its adopted home, gum-paste magnolias adorn it here. For added flavor, we've substituted a tangy cream-cheese frosting for the standard flour-based icing, spreading it between each layer and outside.

Airy layers of pistachio sponge cake are nestled in cloudlike white-chocolate mousse layered with pistachio cream, served with a scoop of pistachio gelato shown at top-right.

The batter produces an extremely moist cake that can be stored for a few days without getting dry. Glaze the cake the day before you serve it so that the coating will be completely hard before you apply the stencil and cocoa powder. Whipped cream and cherry compote or preserves are delicious on the side.

The traditional princess cake, an old Swedish wedding standby, is normally covered in green marzipan. In our decidedly floral interpretation of the confection, we cloaked the dome-shaped cake in pink fondant and topped it with a smattering of real cherry blossoms (make sure to use blooms that have not been sprayed with chemicals), some of which have been coated with sugar and can be eaten if you so choose. Inside, luscious layers of almond-flavored genoise, cherry jam (a nod to the sakura theme), pastry cream, and whipped cream in -- what else? -- pink await guests (right). If you're having a sizable wedding, consider serving a trio of cakes on stands of varying heights for an especially striking display.

The spirit of a century-old French silk ribbon can be felt in every bite of this darling cake. On top rests a dramatic bow of molded gum paste (so realistic, you'll be tempted to untie it). Then we painted edible luster dust mixed with lemon extract onto the fondant in a rose pattern that evokes the blurry quality of an ikat weave. Inside our ikat and French silk ribbon cake, alternating layers of red velvet cake and white buttercream echo the ribbon's stripes (we stacked two of these five-layer tiers).

Intricately designed, this chocolate-mint cake comes off as elegant and polished; after all, the fondant molding, cast from architectural reliefs, was inspired by the interiors of noeclassical architect Robert Adam. But cut into it, and decadence awaits. Each rich slice is laced with a minty buttercream filling.

Whimsical and sweet, like strawberries themselves, this cake -- with its gum-paste fruits and flowers atop white-washed fondant -- is a nod to classic Bavarian style. A basket filled with tiny strawberries tops off the countryside-chic creation.