The Wedding Of King Charles And Princess Diana Involved An Astonishing Number Of Cakes

Some people like the idea of an understated wedding. Maybe just a visit to a Justice of the Peace between the two parties, along with a witness, and nothing more ostentatious than that. Other people like to go all out, especially when it comes to the cake. The Guinness World Record for the largest wedding cake is a baffling 6.8 metric-ton monster with multiple tiers and frosting, made in 2004. But at the 1981 wedding of then‑Prince Charles and Diana Spencer, royal bakers focused on both quantity and quality. There were 24 cakes served in total.

The main wedding cake took 14 weeks to prepare. It was a fruit cake baked by Dave Avery, head baker for the Royal Navy. The five-tier cake was nearly 5.5 feet tall and weighed 225 pounds. About 40 pounds of that was marzipan, and another 175 pounds was fruit like raisins and currants, as well as sugar, flour, eggs, brandy, and rum. The bakers made a second cake as a backup in case anything happened to the first. The cake was also decorated with hand-painted crests and emblems, including the Red Dragon of Wales, Buckingham Palace, and the Spencer family crest, each of which took eight hours to complete.

The other 23 cakes, which were made by bakers from across England, were likely the "eating" cakes for the reception. Some of the official wedding cake was sliced into portions and then boxed up and sold as souvenirs or given away as gifts.

Though 3,500 guests were on hand for the wedding ceremony, just 120 attended the reception and meal that followed, meaning there was a lot of cake to go around. For some idea of how many portions were available, the backup cake kept at the Naval cooking school, where it was baked, was cut into 2,840 pieces. Even if wedding guests were given 3-ounce slices, that still makes about 1,200 slices available just from the main cake, never mind the 23 others that were there.

To this day, people are still buying and selling royal wedding cake slices that were cut to size and stored in officially issued boxes. A slice sold at auction in 2022 for $250. The year prior, a substantially sized piece sold for $2,500. This piece was listed as being from one of the other 23 cakes, not the main cake, served at the wedding. When it was listed at auction, they guessed it was the side or top of a smaller cake that was given to the Queen Mother's staff. It was also not even close to the most expensive slice of royal wedding cake ever sold.

It's unclear how many slices of cake were made available to people as souvenirs, or how many still exist so many years later. It's also unclear what types of cakes the other 23 were. Very few details about them have been provided, including who made them, how big they were, and what ultimately became of them.