Why You Should Keep Weather In Mind When Picking Wedding Cake Frosting

When you imagine yourself tying the knot with your beloved, you might fantasize about walking down the aisle, or slow dancing to your special song. Or, for the purposes of this article, you might think about that beautiful, tiered wedding cake you'll cut into together before feeding each other loving forkfuls. (Hopefully you don't smash your partner's face into it, though — that's all kinds of tacky.) But although we all laughed at Alanis Morissette singing about rain on your wedding day, it's important to consider the weather while planning your nuptials, up to and including the effect it'll have on your cake. Long story short: If you're getting married in the summer, make sure your cake has a stable frosting.

We talked to Laura Kanya, the research and development chef at Ann Clark, and she told us what kinds of frosting might melt right off your cake on a hot day. Be careful when using "unstable frostings such as whipped cream, egg yolk buttercreams (such as German or French) with a higher fat content, [or] Swiss and American buttercreams," Kanya warns. (If you want to learn more about the different buttercreams, check out this list where we rank them by difficulty.) Butter, you see, melts at around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, which can be quite easily achieved if the day is particularly hot or humid. That means your Swiss or French buttercream might completely collapse from the heat, leaving your cake shamefully runny.

So how do you keep your wedding cake strong and stable, even on a hot summer's day? Well, air conditioning certainly wouldn't hurt. But aside from that, Laura Kanya suggests making use of Italian buttercream, a notoriously sturdy buttercream, for your cake. "The cooked sugar in the Italian meringue has a higher sugar content than other frostings," she says. More sugar means less butter, which means less capacity for melting. Plus, thanks to the way Italian buttercream is made (involving egg whites and a hot sugar syrup), it's given an extra boost of sturdiness. "The heat in the sugar slightly cooks the egg whites, giving it more stability," Kanya says.

If you really have your heart set on another kind of buttercream, though, there are still other things you can do to keep your wedding cake safe. Kanya says you can "add some shortening in place of some of the butter, since it has a higher melting point." The key word there is "some", however. "Typically, I would swap half of the butter for shortening on a hot day, so I could still get the mouthfeel and flavor of the butter," Kanya explains. Whether you (or the person baking your wedding cake) make use of Crisco or some other kind of shortening, it might just be the thing that saves your wedding day. Isn't it ironic, indeed.