"Royal Wedding" news and stories

You've probably seen some breathtaking wedding cakes in your lifetime, but we doubt you've encountered anything like this.

The cake for Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, was an eight-tiered ivory showpiece decorated with 900 delicate sugar-paste flowers. The cake was showcased at this afternoon's Buckingham Palace reception, reports The Daily Mail.

How long does it take to make a cake like this? Think weeks, not days. Five weeks, to be exact.The palace contacted baker Fiona Cairns and her team in Febraury to request the cake, and it turns out the bride had some specific requests.

"Catherine did not want it to be seven feet tall, she didn't want it to be towering and thin, and I think we succeeded," says Cairns.

The bride also wanted elements from the Joseph Lambeth technique of cake decoration, so the cake features a lot of intricate piping work, as you can see from the photos.

A hidden treat for architecuture buffs? Cairns used some of the details of the reception room in the design. 'We reflected some of the architectural details in the room so the garlands on the walls were reproduced loosely on the fourth tier - we've used roses, acorns, ivy leaves, apple blossom and bridal rose," she says.

Not surprisingly, details on the Royal Wedding cake are a closely guarded secret (don't bother asking how many layers the cake will have), and the pastry chef Fiona Cairns is keeping her lips mostly sealed tight, reports The Telegraph.

Cairns, 56, has been making cakes for 25 years. She cannot disclose how much she, or her staff is getting paid for this royal job.

Here's what we do know about the cake, from Caims' interview with The Telegraph:

The cake weighs more than a sumo wrestler (and seems significantly larger than the groom's cake). There are 17 different types of flowers. It is a rich fruitcake and each guest will be able to get a small slice. The colors will be white and cream and there will be no pillars. The cake will be transported in a van, but don't worry, there is a Plan B in case something goes wrong.

Sounds like it could be the most substantial food item the guests eat all day.

What else can we be sure of? The cake certainly won't look like any of these bizarre iterations.

All the Royal Wedding food-related hoopla is just about at its boiling point (though props to the Papa John's employee that created this "beauty"), but finally, something...more stimulating. The folks at craft beer company BrewDog, known for other beer-related stunts such as the world's strongest beer and beer served in taxidermed animals, have created a limited edition "Royal Virility Performance" beer with "Viagra, chocolate, Horny Goat Weed and 'a healthy dose of sarcasm'." Only 1,000 bottles will be made, and the beer will ship on April 28, the day before the Royal Wedding. BrewDog explains:

With this beer we want to take the wheels off the royal wedding bandwagon being jumped on by dozens of breweries; The Royal Virility Performance is the perfect antidote to all the hype. A beer should be brewed with a purpose, not just because some toffs are getting married, so we created something at our brewery that will undermine those special edition beers and other assorted seaside tat, whilst at the same time actually give the happy couple something extra on their big day...There is more to brewing and tasting beer than putting a royal wedding label on it, so we're showing everyone just how ludicrous it is.

BrewDog claims they have sent Prince William a complimentary bottle.

The odds that Betty Crocker would be asked to bake the wedding cake for Prince William and his fiancée may seem about as likely as Spam showing up on the couple's hors d'oeuvres list, but that hasn't stopped the icon of a certain kind of middle-class American domesticity from trying to get in on the royal wedding action.

And dare we say that the old gal has done a pretty good job of it.

With much fawning hoopla, Betty Crocker has created four different wedding cakes for Will and Kate in anticipation of what no doubt will soon be dubbed the "wedding of the decade" on April 29. Each cake takes as its theme part of the classic British wedding tradition of "something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue."

Planning a wedding is enough to drive any normal couple to drink, much less the successors to the royal throne.

Thus, we won't fault Prince William and princess-to-be Kate Middleton if they need to sand away their stress with a cool pint of beer -- or four. If that's the case, the couple should order a keg of the aptly named Kiss Me Kate, a commemorative brew crafted by Nottingham, England's Castle Rock Brewery.

"Kiss Me Kate will be elegant, tasteful and British to the core," head brewer Adrian Redgrove said of the pale ale, which will be released about a month before the April 29 wedding.