Making the cake yourself can be a good way to save money. If you are planning a fruit cake, you should start baking about three months before the wedding and ideally the cake should stand for six to nine weeks before icing.

With all the other wedding preparations, you may feel you don’t have the time to bake, ice and decorate a cake yourself and there may be a friend or relative who would be willing to do it for you. A word of warning: intricate decoration and a professional finish are tricky even for a competent cake-maker. An amateur cake can be a major source of disaster and at least you can complain to a professional if something goes wrong.

For an elegant home-made wedding cake, cover each cake with smooth fondant icing and then stack progressively smaller tiers directly on top of one another. Don’t attempt fiddly details but pipe a simple rim of icing around the joins, or secure narrow ribbons around the base of each layer.

Then decorate on the day with fresh flowers. It was traditional in some countries to hide a ring and other tokens in the wedding cake. Whoever found the ring was said to be the next to be married. Finding a token was thought to ensure happiness for the coming year