Recipes

• Perhaps the best thing about designing your own wedding cake is that any cake at all can become a wedding cake. What separates wedding cakes from other kinds of cake is merely decoration. If Uncle Steve used to make a killer gluten-free cake when you were little and you want that as your wedding cake, there's absolutely no reason you can't do it.

  Gluten-free cake recipes come in nearly as many varieties as more common cake recipes do. If you're nervous about going with a cake recipe you've never used before, bake a small sample cake ahead of time. You can even share the "test" cake and gather opinions from members of your wedding party.

Things to Consider

• Many gluten-free cake recipes rely rather heavily on eggs to provide structure to the cake. This also makes them a little spongier and more delicate to handle. If you haven't had much experience in cake decoration, you may want to try decorating your sample cake before you eat it, just to make sure that your decoration plan will work with this type of cake.

  When you bake an egg-heavy gluten-free cake, you'll also want to make doubly sure that it doesn't stick to your pans. Gluten-free cake batters tend to be stickier than standard cake batters. Even if the recipe doesn't specify that you should use parchment paper in the bottom of your cake pans, use it--on top of greasing and flouring (nonwheat flour, of course) the bottom and sides. Also, waxed paper is not the same as parchment paper, and should not be used as a substitute.

  Take extra precautions to ensure level cakes anytime you plan to decorate them. Use a baking core. To do this, fill your cake pan with batter and then stick the well-greased core in the middle, with the hollow end down. A small piece of cake will bake inside the core while the rest of the cake bakes outside it. Simply pop this piece of cake out of the core and back into the center of your cake after baking. After you decorate your cake, no one will know it was ever there.

  Cake strips are more useful tools that work just as well for gluten-free wedding cakes as for any standard cake. These, just like a good baking core, work by more evenly distributing the heat throughout the cake. When heat is distributed evenly, your cakes will be more level and dome-free--a definite plus for your gluten-free wedding cake.