Tall, Elegant, Luxury Wedding Cake with Sugar Flowers

This Tall, Elegant, Luxury Wedding Cake with Sugar Flowers is a cake that brides dream of. It was the height of nine tiers covered in buttercream with delicious fillings and stunning sprays of white sugar flowers including roses, peonies, tulips, and more!

This cake was a dream come true for the bride! That’s literally what she had to say on Instagram:

This cake couldn’t have been anymore perfect than what it was. Who needs Sylvia Weinstock when they have you to make all of their dreams come true. This cake truly made me feel like royalty on my wedding day. 🤍 thank you to you and everyone who helped make mine and Kyzar’s cakes. ~ Mary Elizabeth Jordan Huff, bride

And honestly, it was a dream come true for me as well! I’d never had an opportunity to do a cake like this. I was honored that Mary Elizabeth’s family trusted me with her cake dreams. All of the cake designs that she liked were gorgeous and I was immediately excited to do a new design and be challenged to expand my skills.

The venue, Dunleith Historic Inn in Natchez, MS is a gorgeous home already. But for Mary Elizabeth’s wedding, it was so much more! Everything there looked like it was straight out of a magazine. It was beyond dreamy – just like a fairytale. There were thousands of white flowers, a gold gate, stunning bridesmaids’ dresses, and so much more! Not to mention the bride … just wow!

Tall, Elegant, Luxury Wedding Cake with Sugar Flowers

There were too many perfect details to mention but here’s one photo that was taken in the room with the cake. Isn’t that gorgeous?

So… for all of you cake decorators out there, here are all the details:

Wedding Cake Flavors:

• This cake was all white almond sour cream cake.
• All the tiers were filled and frosted with vanilla buttercream.
• To add some variety, I also used strawberry filling in every other tier (starting at the bottom tier). The strawberry filling is made exactly like this raspberry filling using this recipe.

How big were the cake tiers?

I know you’re asking… it’s the most common question I’ve gotten about this cake. Here are the sizes, starting at the top and going down:

• 4-inch dummy cake (to accommodate the sugar flowers). It was 5 inches tall.
• 6-inch tier (double barrel, 8-inches tall)
• 8-inch tier (5 inches tall)
• 10-inch tier (double barrel, 8-inches tall)
• 12-inch tier (5 inches tall)
• 14-inch tier (double barrel, 8-inches tall)

If you’re doing the math, that’s 39 inches of cake (including the dummy). But that didn’t include the height of the flowers on the top tier. The flowers easily added 4 or 5 more inches. I estimate that it was around 45 inches tall in total.

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Round Pans

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Bubble Tea Straws

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Cake Rounds

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However, the stand (provided by the venue and the biggest I’ve ever seen) was at least 10 inches tall (and 30 inches across). So it added even more height and grandeur to an already tall, elegant cake!

Here’s a photo of my friend/helper/assistant Susan and me with the finished cake:

Sugar Flowers & Pearls

Because of my hand/arm history, I can no longer make sugar flowers. For a short time, I really enjoyed that craft. But now it’s excruciating for me (the longer I work, the more I hurt). Instead, I now choose to outsource most sugar flowers. It gives work to artists really gifted in this area and spares me a lot of hand pain.

For this cake, I purchased close to two hundred flowers including peonies, sugar roses (in different sizes and varieties), tulips, and cherry blossoms, plus filler sprays of berries, hydrangeas, and leaves. I didn’t end up using them all but I wanted the cascades and sprays of flowers to be showstoppers. And I knew I’d need a lot of flowers to accomplish that!

All of the flowers and leaves were white with white wires/stems to keep the design clean and gorgeous. It didn’t photograph well but I sprayed some of the flowers with a pearl spray to add a little more pizazz. This added depth and a pretty shimmer while keeping the all-white aesthetic.

We also trimmed every tier with white sugar pearls. My daughter Sarah made these for me using these pearl molds and homemade marshmallow fondant.

I was a little concerned about how to attach the flowers but my friend Minette (who is amazing and a pro with sugar flowers!) assured me that there was no big secret to it… just push them straight into the cake. For this cake, all the wires were wrapped and/or dipped in this Safety Seal coating. You could also insert the wires into coffee straws then push those into the cake to create a barrier between the cake and the wires.

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Coffee Straws

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Safety Seal

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Pearl Mold

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How do you transport & assemble a cake that tall?

Every cake I’ve ever made has been assembled with single-layer cake rounds, bubble tea straws, and wooden dowel rods. Every single cake for 12 years… including this one. But this cake was taller than any cake I’d ever made and I wouldn’t recommend my method for a cake this tall.

What I’m saying is, I’ll probably do it differently next time, if given the chance. I’ll explain more below.

For 99% of my cakes, I assemble them at home and transport them to the venue. They’re fully chilled and generally still cold when we arrive. Obviously, that wasn’t an option this time. So we only assembled the bottom two tiers at home, then assembled all the rest on site.

They were all cold when we loaded them at home but because it took hours to assemble and decorate – they were not still cold when we finished. Again – something I’ll have to consider next time. Below are a few photos of our vehicles that day. We had to take two and it was around a 45-minute drive.

Transporting the cakes…

Above is truck number one. I drove this truck which we lined with a black sheet, then non-skid mats, and we had sheets of insulation on each side to block sunlight. You might be wondering about the stacked cakes.

Well… I had two other weddings that day too. So there was the 4-tier cake, the 3-tier cake, then all the pieces of the big cake I’m sharing in this post. The only tiers not pictured were the top 4-inch tier, which you’ll see in the other truck, and the double-barrel 6-inch cake. Susan held it for the entire drive because we were afraid it would tip over.

You can see my hubby below carrying in the already-assembled bottom two tiers. I had also added most of the flowers on those tiers at home to try and shave off some time at the venue.

Then there was truck number two:

This truck was also lined with a black sheet and non-skid mats. My husband and Sarah rode in this truck where we carried the shotgun groom’s cake (a post for another day), 12 dozen chocolate-dipped strawberries, the pre-made sugar pearls, the top tier (in the box with a roll of paper towels), and all of my tools and decor for all the cakes, including the step-stools, extra buttercream, the flowers, etc.

We were fully loaded and ready to roll! I’m not sure we could’ve taken anything else even if we’d needed to.

Update: currently I use Sugarworks Cake Porter boxes for transporting all of my cakes. If I’d had them for this cake, it would’ve been a game changer!

Confession time…

Now here’s a confession for you – I don’t think I’d do a cake with these dimensions again or assemble it in the same way. At the very least, I’d have a better plan in place for structure.

Specifically, the 6-inch double barrel cake was (almost) a big mistake. After all the trouble we had with that tier, I decided then and there I’d never do a cake again with a tier taller than it was wide.

A little backstory – both my husband and my friend/assistant Susan were with me for the whole process. My daughter Sarah was also present for an extra set of hands and to document the assembly with photos.

Everything was going great until we added the 6-inch tier, then the 4-inch tier loaded with flowers on top. Simply put, I underestimated how wobbly the cake would be once assembled, and that 6-inch tier wobbled the most.

The pictures are grainy but I had to share because Richy (my hubby) stood on a stepladder, in that position, holding that top tier to prevent the whole thing from wobbling. He stood that way for more than an hour while Susan and I added flowers and pearls and smoothed the buttercream.

My cake hero:

I still consider him my hero for that day! He took the top tiers on and off for me (more than once!) while I brainstormed for how to make it stay stable and secure. And Susan… she kept me sane.

She talked me through a near panic attack the first time I realized it wasn’t as sturdy as I’d hoped. And she kept all bystanders out of the room so I could work without an audience (which adds even more stress for me).

At the end of the day, the bubble tea straws and dowels had held everything wonderfully. God answered all the prayers and kept the cake in place. It did feel secure when we left but I was still a wreck – worried that someone would bump the table and it would all come tumbling down.

I could not have been more relieved to see pictures from the wedding of the bride and groom cutting the cake and it still standing tall and beautiful. It was like a weight was lifted off of me and I could finally truly enjoy what I had accomplished with this Tall, Elegant, Luxury Wedding Cake with Sugar Flowers!

Aren’t they a gorgeous couple? At the end of it all, I was so proud of how beautiful it was and that it was a cake I made! It was breathtaking in person and it felt surreal to be able to claim it as one of “my cakes!”

Even with the stress of that top tier, looking at the pics now, I’m still in love with the cake and so happy I did it. The experience reaffirmed my love for wedding cakes and I’m actually excited to do another one like this having learned so much about what I could do to improve my process!

• The beautiful couple: Kyzar & Mary Elizabeth Jordan Huff
• The venue: Dunleith Historic Inn
• Portrait by T.G. McCary

Here are some other posts you might like:

• How to Smooth Frost a Cake and How to Get Sharp Buttercream Edges {Video Tutorial}
• How far in advance can I bake cakes?
• Elegant Tall Lace Wedding Cake with Gold Monogram
• Vintage Lace Wedding Cake with Sugar Roses
• How do you package cakes for delivery?
• Vertical Lines in Buttercream Luxury Wedding Cake
• Barely Naked Wedding Cake with Floral Wreath Cake Stand

Do you have any questions? Or did I miss any details? I’d love it if you’d leave me a comment!