American wedding cake toppers—as we understand them today—date back to nineteenth-century marriage rituals. Royal, aristocratic, and wealthy Europeans set the trend of “high rise” cakes “decorated with mounds of sugar sculptures” as early as 1840. Cakes with columns, crowns, cupids, portrait medallions, ornamental statues, blossoms, and pearls made from confectioners’ sugar paste “would have been available only to the wealthiest,” due to the “sugar work, which was cost prohibitive to the masses.” These styles led to popularized iterations by the 1890s: “The cakes were not as grand as the royal cakes, of course, but were nevertheless elaborately adorned with flowers, symbols of love, plus the soon-to-become-popular bride and groom cake toppers that could be removed from the wedding cake and kept as a keepsake for the ages.”
Attachable wedding cake toppers of artificial flowers “became the first arrangements that could be removed by the newlyweds and placed under a dome as a keepsake of their wedding” in the 1880s, leading to other new removable toppers like cupids, joined hands, bridal slippers, doves, rings, and horseshoes. In 1892, a Scottish firm advertised in the British Baker their patented icing powder creation: a bride and groom cake topper, “a harbinger of an idea which was to run around the world in the mid-twentieth century.”
With growing techniques for mass production, decorative and opulent tchotchkes of the wealthy became increasingly abundant and affordable to an emergent middle-class consumer. By the late 1890s, the United States would become “the forerunner in the production of mass-produced bride and groom cake toppers,” likely “made in molds,” leading to a meteoric rise in their presence by the turn of the twentieth century. These American ornaments were “of a much more representational and symbolic kind” than European counterparts. Bride and groom ornaments became standard fare by the 1920s, as well as infantile Kewpie couples.
These early instances of wedding cake toppers prefigure the tropes and motifs that continue throughout the twentieth century and remain popular today. In general, ornaments fall under two broad visual categories: (1) symbols and (2) icons. I invoke these terms in their semiotic sense. Symbolic wedding cake toppers employ associative imagery reliant on societal conventions of love, prosperity, and good fortune; iconic ornaments are those that intend to resemble or bear likeness to the married couple, thereby both standing for and representing their union. Symbol and icon are not mutually exclusive classifications. Elaborate wedding cake toppers frequently synthesize several elements from both typologies.