14-07-2025
The Charming Southern Wedding Tradition That Gives The Cake Extra Meaning
While the world's oldest preserved cake dates back nearly 4,000 years, wedding cakes can be roughly traced back about 2,500 years to Ancient Rome. Some of the earliest known examples of wedding cakes were hearty bakes made from wheat or barley that were actually more like bread. After the wedding ceremony, the groom would break the cake over the bride's head and the guests would gather up the crumbs. This tradition was meant to invite fertility and prosperity to the happy couple's union and allow the guests to share in their good luck, and it's one of the reasons we eat cake at weddings today.
As modern wedding cake trends evolved throughout the decades, the cakes became much more elaborate and lavish than those made in Ancient Rome. Yet they are still seen as a symbol of luck and happiness in many cultures. In the South, some wedding couples choose to embrace a time-honored good luck tradition called a cake pull. A cake pull is a charming southern wedding tradition that occurs before the cake is cut. After the wedding ceremony, the bride invites her close friends to pull ribbons from in between the layers of the wedding cake, and the charms at the end of the ribbons are meant to be symbols of good luck or fate.
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While a groom's cake is a southern tradition that allows the groom and his friends to be more involved in the ceremony, a cake pull gives the bride a unique and sweet way to include her closest friends. Before the wedding cake is frosted, the bride chooses charms that have special meanings. Some of the most commonly used charms are a ring to symbolize marriage, a baby to indicate a growing family, or a four-leaf clover for good luck. These charms are then attached to ribbons that the baker places between the layers of the cake or underneath its bottom layer. After the wedding ceremony, the bride invites members of her wedding party, traditionally single women, to pull the ribbons from the cake. The charm each finds at the end of their ribbon is meant to reveal their future.
Like the origin of wedding cake toppers, the ribbon pulling or cake pulling tradition began in the Victorian era. Silver charms were sewn into the hem of the bride's gown, and guests were invited to pull them off and keep them as good luck charms. As bridal pies and cakes became more popular, charms were baked into the dessert for guests to find, or attached to ribbons and pulled from a cake. The charm that each guest received was a symbol of their fate. This tradition made its way to New Orleans in the early 1900s when a baker named Henry C. McKenzie created his own version using charms specifically related to New Orleans culture. Much like the way that wedding guests gathered crumbs from broken wedding cakes in Ancient Rome, the cake pull tradition invites members of the bride's wedding party to participate in a symbolic good luck ceremony.
Read the original article on Tasting Table.
