Weddingbee Blog

Trying to find a cake stand was really frustrating. Our cake baker had one rule: for tiered cakes, she would only accept a platform type of stand. That was fine with us, as we didn’t want to chance a toppling cake! However, once we saw the platform stands available, we were disappointed with the choices. Our cake inspiration was of a very graphic nature, and we really wanted a simple black stand. I know I’ve shown you this a few times, but here it is again:

From In Style weddings, Spring 2008

We were hoping for a black stand, but we couldn’t find a black platform anywhere. The elaborate silver platforms that our baker had were beautiful, but really clashed with the graphic elements of our cake design. I was really getting nervous, and hadn’t once considered making our own stand…

Enter Miss Stiletto, who was having similar issues back in March and posted this entry with a wonderful link to this Martha Stewart DIY cake stand tutorial. I showed it to Mr, Taffy right away! I was hoping that he was pining over days spent in the wood shop during his time as an industrial design student, and would be excited to hand make something for our wedding.

The Martha Stewart tutorial image as a finished stand:

image source

Luckily, Mr. Taffy loved the idea and started right away! The tutorial suggests using decorative knobs to support the stand, but since we wanted a very plain stand, we used regular wooden knobs and also omitted the ribbon. Here is the stand before he painted it:

Our lower tier was very wide, so he used extra knobs for support:

Here are some photos after he painted it. These are pretty bad photos; I took these during a middle of the night during a pre-wedding crafting frenzy!

Mr. Taffy asked a few times to make sure I wanted a black stand. Since our cake didn’t have any blue on it, I ordered a light blue cloth that matched our runners for the cake table. I loved the idea of having all of the black and white frosted goodness on top of the blue. I want to wait until we get our pro pics to show you the full cake, but here is a (awkwardly cropped) sneak peek at the finished stand and the linens:

Mr. Taffy did such a great job, and I think that he was happy to have his finished project displayed prominently.

Are you having a hard time finding the perfect stand? We highly recommend the Martha tutorial!