How to serve chocolate cake

Description: Chocolate wedding cake is a fun and contemporary choice, and is likely to be popular with your guests. These seven tips on serving chocolate cake will help you to get it just right.

Tips for serving chocolate wedding cake

Chocolate wedding cake is a fun and decadent alternative to more traditional wedding cake styles, and many couples find their guest are more enthusiastic about a chocolate creation than a fruit cake. Cute photos of your angelic flower girls tucking into chunks of sticky chocolate cake can also make a great addition to your wedding album.

Chocolate cake can be a little heavy or sickly sweet, however, depending on the type of cake and chocolate that you use, so here are seven tips on serving chocolate wedding cake to make sure yours really hits the spot.

1.    Serve your cake as dessert

Chocolate wedding cake makes a great dessert, and if you use serve your cake as dessert you will be saving money on the wedding catering. If you choose another dessert, your guests will probably be too full to really enjoy a piece of chocolate cake later on, but if you are having dessert and cake, make sure your dessert is a light fruity one.

2.    Serve a variety of chocolates

If you are having a traditional style tiered chocolate wedding cake, try to have a different chocolate for each layer. Most guests will enjoy milk chocolate, so have the largest layer in milk, the next layer in white chocolate for those with a sweet tooth, and the smallest later in dark chocolate for guests that prefer a more bitter taste. If you are having a cupcake tower it is very easy to include a range of different chocolates.

3.    Include a fruity element

Whether you use actual fresh fruit, a fruit sauce or syrup, or simple some fruit flavouring, an element of fruit in your chocolate wedding cake is an easy way to lighten it up. In the summer try white chocolate with lemon or raspberry, and in the winter try dark chocolate with black cherry. Spring and autumn are the perfect opportunity for milk chocolate with strawberry or orange.

4.    Use chocolate accessories

A chocolate wedding cake with a rich chocolate sponge, chocolate butter cream, and a chocolate fudge style topping is probably going to be too much for some of your guests. Consider keeping the cake itself lighter, perhaps with a toffee or vanilla sponge and a thin layer of chocolate icing, and then use chocolate truffles, curls or sticks to accessorise it. A very popular style of chocolate wedding cake includes circular sponge or ice cream tiers completely encircled in chocolate sticks.

5.    Think about storage and display

Check with your cake supplier whether the chocolate wedding cake you have chosen needs to be stored at a certain temperature, and how long you can display it for without it starting to melt. You shouldn’t have any problems in an air conditioned function suite, but you may need to make alternative arrangements if you are planning an outdoor wedding.

6.    Serve with cream

Traditionally wedding cake is served on its own, but chocolate wedding cake may need something extra such as cream or ice cream. Talk to your cake designer about what might work, and consider interestingly flavoured creams or ice creams as an alternative to vanilla. If you are having a winter wedding, check whether slices of your wedding cake could easily be heated up to serve with ice cream.

7.    Serve bitter drinks

Sweet liqueurs will be too overpowering with a chocolate wedding cake, so make sure there is espresso, brandy, whiskey, grappa or port available for your guests to balance out the sugary taste of the cake.