11 DIY Wedding Cake Ideas That Will Transform Your Tiers

Order mini buttercream cakes—one for every two guests. Then, create the geometric patterns by sifting colored sugar (try Wilton bright shimmer dust) mixed with confectioners' sugar over each. Delight guests with a different flavor for every design.

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.

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.

The Details: Cake panels, $400 for 100 panels, ChristopherNormanChocolates.com.

Not to be overly dramatic, but stop the presses! We've discovered the one cake-decorating tool that will change your life (or at least your sweets table). The aptly named CakeVase is a clear plastic disk with divots for holding flower stems. The disk keeps the flowers crisp and vibrant for hours—and the cake pristine because the décor and the dessert never touch each other.

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 (we used La Vie de La Vosgienne), 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.

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.

The Details: Ateco Teardrop Cookie Cutters, $16, SurlaTable.com.

Download our PDF files for this ranunculus cake swag, and print clip art onto 8 1/2-by-11-inch cover-weight paper (send the monogram wreath to a calligrapher to monogram, or initial it yourself).