There’s a funny thing about looking back as a wedding cake designer Scotland through 15 years of your own work.
You start spotting patterns you didn’t realise were there.
I recently disappeared down the rabbit hole of my old wedding cakes, and I expected to see a neat progression. Early work, years of learning, eventually leading to the colourful, sculptural direction Crumbdidilyumptious has taken today.
That isn’t what I found.
Apparently, I’ve always been like this.
There were sculptural chocolate wraps in 2013. A Monopoly wedding cake in 2015. Bright colour, unusual structures and cakes designed around hobbies, stories and personalities.
In 2017, I was making tilted tiers in turquoise and gold.
In 2018, there were bold Jamaican-inspired wedding cakes and a Beauty and the Beast design with a rose suspended in the space between the tiers.
By 2019 I was mixing geometric shapes, abstract painted patterns and metallic finishes.
In 2020 there were oversized bows, gold leaf, unusual structures and metal hoops incorporated into designs.
And in 2023, I made a black sculptural cake with huge amounts of texture and an enormous circular void through the middle.
So no.
Colour isn’t my new direction.
Sculpture isn’t my new direction.
Personal wedding cakes definitely aren’t my new direction.
The only thing that’s changed is that I’ve stopped treating them as the exception.
What changed for me as a wedding cake designer in Scotland?
I got very good at making what people asked me for.
And for quite a few years, what people asked me for was overwhelmingly the same thing.
White. Ivory. Semi-naked. Soft florals. Foliage.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with those cakes. I’ve made plenty of beautiful ones, and they were right for the couples who chose them.
But there was a problem.
The more of them I showed, the more enquiries I received for them.
The more enquiries I received for them, the more I made.
And the more I made, the more my portfolio suggested that this was what Crumbdidilyumptious did.
Meanwhile, the strange ones kept appearing whenever somebody gave me the opportunity.
The colourful one.
The cake based around a couple’s
The cake based entirely around a couple and the things they loved.
The weird structural idea.
The dark cake.
The one where I could paint, carve, build, texture or make something behave in a way cake wasn’t really expected to behave.
Those were the cakes that made my brain light up.
And yet I’d somehow allowed them to become the occasional exception to the rule.
I hadn’t lost my style as a wedding cake designer in Scotland. I’d buried it.
That’s the distinction I didn’t understand until I looked back.
My design style hadn’t disappeared.
I hadn’t suddenly become creative again in 2026.
The evidence was sitting in photographs going back years.
What had changed was the work I was being commissioned to make.
And eventually I realised that if I wanted different enquiries, I had to stop waiting for clients to somehow know about the work I wasn’t showing them.
I needed to show people what they could ask me for.
That meant changing the business.
The rebrand wasn’t really about branding
Yes, the website changed.
The photography changed.
The colours became richer. The language became stronger. The whole thing finally started looking like the work I wanted to create.
But this wasn’t a case of deciding I wanted to move into the luxury wedding market and inventing a completely new version of myself to fit it.
It was almost the opposite.
I stopped trying to fit.
I decided Crumbdidilyumptious would be the place for the work I actually wanted to make.
Colour.
Sculpture.
Texture.
Unexpected shapes.
Ridiculous details.
Sugar flowers.
Personal and cultural references.
Cakes that don’t necessarily look like somebody else’s idea of a wedding cake.
And increasingly, edible experiences that don’t necessarily look like a cake at all.
Bespoke should mean more than choosing someone else’s cake
One thing has been remarkably consistent throughout my work.
I’m far more interested in you than I am in your Pinterest cake board.
Tell me what you’re wearing.
Show me the venue.
Tell me about your cultures, flowers, favourite places, family traditions, tattoos, jewellery, hobbies and the ridiculous little things that only make sense to the two of you.
Tell me how you want the room to feel.
You don’t need to know what any of that should look like as a cake.
That’s my job.
Years ago, that approach resulted in a wedding cake with a couple’s camper on top and their paddleboards incorporated into a painted landscape.
Today, the same thinking might lead somewhere considerably more sculptural.
The method hasn’t really changed.
I’ve just become much more deliberate about it.
It’s also why I created my Bespoke Wedding Cake Blueprint. I wanted couples to have a way to think about their cake without beginning with photographs of cakes that already exist.
Because the most interesting question isn’t:
“Which cake do you like?”
It’s:
“What feels like you?”
I’m not interested in being the right designer for everyone
That’s probably the biggest change.
For years, like many small businesses, I thought success meant being able to accommodate as many potential clients as possible.
Now I’m perfectly comfortable saying that I won’t be the right cake designer for everybody.
If you’ve fallen completely in love with a classic white semi-naked wedding cake, there are brilliant wedding cake designers in Scotland who adore making them.
You should book one of them.
But if you’re looking at your wedding and thinking:
Could we do something completely different?
Come and sit beside me. 🤣
Because those are the conversations I want to have.
Maybe this isn’t a rebellion after all,
Looking through all those old photographs, I realised something.
I didn’t spend 15 years slowly becoming this designer.
She was already there.
Sometimes she was making a colourful geometric wedding cake.
Sometimes she was wrapping chocolate into sculptural forms.
Sometimes she was putting a camper on top of a wedding cake.
And sometimes she was buried underneath another weekend of white buttercream and foliage.
The rebrand didn’t create her.
It just finally gave her control of the business.
So perhaps my rebellion against the expected isn’t about becoming someone new.
It’s about no longer waiting for permission to make the work I’ve been trying to make all along.
I don’t do forgettable.
Turns out I never really did.