To a surprising extent, creating a wedding cake is much like constructing a building, although one hopes that the finished product will take shape more quickly. The cake's form is determined by the function it has to fulfill. Being a major focus of the wedding day, it has to be beautiful to look at, but it also has to serve dozens, sometimes even hundreds, of people. Just as an architect is given the parameters of a building site, a cake maker is given the requirements of the wedding celebration. Then a basic decision must be made: either to build horizontally as if creating an office complex in the suburbs, or to construct vertically, as in an urban skyscraper.

Most often, cake makers choose the vertical route: Tall wedding cakes are the rule rather than the exception in most parts of the world. Consider both the three-tiered wedding cake served at a small backyard wedding in the United States and the teetering croquembouche served at a French provincial wedding. Like cathedrals and skyscrapers, tall cakes reach for the sky, toward the infinite, toward heaven. While horizontal cakes can be as beautiful as any skyscraper, the tall cake is grander, and more easily visible to every guest, staking its claim to a dominant place at the party. Tall cakes, however, pose a number of challenges to cake designers. Like architects, cake makers have to balance the horizontal and the vertical to achieve a good-looking edifice.

Tall cakes run into the same laws of physics as tall buildings: If they're built too high, and the weight isn't evenly distributed, the cake may either cant like the Tower of Pisa, or, worse, collapse altogether. British wedding cakes are traditionally made of dense fruitcake reinforced on the outside with layers of marzipan and hard icing. The overall mass of cake becomes so solid that the upper layers cannot sink into the lower layers. The consequence of all this, though, is that not only will the icing not give way under the weight of the higher tiers, it will sometimes not give way under the cake knife, a source of many nostalgic anecdotes in the United Kingdom.

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