These Wedding Cakes Are Going to Great Lengths

These Wedding Cakes Are Going to Great Lengths

Why are receptions (and Instagram) increasingly filled with table-long confections?

After months of brainstorming how to have the most delicious wedding cake possible, Rachel Karten and Roxanne Rosensteel, a pastry chef based in Santa Barbara, Calif., concluded that only one kind of wedding cake could fit the bill: a big sheet cake.

The original plan was to have four of them, but when Ms. Karten, the former head of social media at Bon Appétit, saw the 3-foot-long cake at the designer Sandy Liang’s wedding in June, she asked Ms. Rosensteel if it might be possible to combine four sheet cakes into one.

It was. Ms. Rosensteel baked an olive oil chiffon and plum jam cake, topped with burnt honey buttercream and delicate purple gomphrena blooms that measured just over 4 and a half feet — a size dictated by the width of Ms. Rosensteel’s car. (Other bakers may travel with the cake in parts and put it together on-site.)

Ms. Karten drew inspiration from the designer Sandy Liang’s wedding to Dorian Booth, which also featured a mega cake.Rae Ravich