These Are the Biggest New Wedding Cake Trends, According to Pinterest

What’s the first thing a couple does after getting engaged? Hopefully it’s inform all their friends and family, but right after that the happy couple is most likely heading to Pinterest to start their wedding planning boards. It seems like everybody uses Pinterest for wedding planning, and that means Pinterest is uniquely well-suited to predict the biggest wedding trends.

Pinterest can see what engaged couples are pinning, and this year Pinterest says the driving theme is simplicity, even when it comes to wedding cakes.

“Don’t let your dessert outshine you on your wedding day — swap those towering behemoths for something a little more elegant and low-key,” Pinterest advises in its annual wedding report.

According to Pinterest, these are the biggest wedding cake trends of 2018.

The biggest new wedding cake trend, according to Pinterest, is fig cakes. This one actually surprised me. Fig cakes? Really? But searches for fig cakes are up 575 percent over last year, and judging from some of the photos on Pinterest, it’s easy to see why. Figs seem to be replacing greenery as the cascading botanical cake decoration of choice, and they make a lovely impression. A cake topped with whole and halved figs starts to look like a Renaissance still life. It’s elegant, but artsy.

Fig makes a great flavor inside a cake, too. Fig cakes are often fruity and spicy, with nuts, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and cloves. It’s a delicious option, and it definitely calls to mind the fact that royal wedding cakes are usually white-frosted fruit cakes.

According to Pinterest, metallic decorations are trending big time, even on the cakes. Searches for metallic decorations are up 476 percent, and cakes are being covered in gold leaf, painted gold, topped with layers of dripping gold, or stamped with a few gold metallic accents.

Gold cakes sound like they could go from “modern glamour” to “ersatz Versailles” very quickly, but from the looks of Pinterest’s gold cakes board, the key is keeping everything else about the cake smooth and minimal. Spray-painting a nine-foot 1980s flower bomb cake gold might be a bit much, but a smooth gold finish on an otherwise simple cake looks glam but elegant, and the cakes seem like they’d look gorgeous under candlelight.

The overall theme of these cake trends seems to be subdued glamour, or elegant minimalism. Searches for minimal, white frosting are up 235 percent, as people seem to be seeking out simple cakes instead of complicated show-stoppers.

All three of these trends work together, too. If you add them all up, it looks like a smooth, white-frosted cake topped with figs — some of them painted gold —might be the most on-trend cake of 2018.

What do you think of these wedding cake trends?