Show me your fondant-free cakes!

Ours was very basic, I wanted white and red flowers on top. But this is all butter cream!

We also had the option of doing a ribbon at the bottom of each level, but we forgot to give them the ribbon

Here are two other options we thought about

We are having a cake very similar to this- it will be all cream.

We actually had a whipped cream frosting. Our cake was white with strawberry filling and the bakery that we went through is known for making beautiful cakes with whipped frosting.

Here was ours! I always prefer fondant-free wedding cakes. The simpler the better IMO.

We had the bottom tier textured and top was smooth. It was a really light and fluffy vanilla buttercream. AMAZING!

This will be ours (minus the flowers) but it will be in an ombre aqua color.

I love these! VM, I am probably going to have to show them yours as an inspiration picture since we want some blue on it. Thank you!

ETA Wolf, that ombre is awesome!

Ours was actually cream cheese! The bakery said they would only do those in colder months though because of the risk of melting.

I'm so glad I'm not the only one that is put off by fondant. I love looking at all the buttercream cakes. I've been thinking for mine that I wanted something very similar to the second one that NowASeptMrs posted. Simple but beautiful.

ETA - Wolf! I love that ombre.

I don't have a cake to show you, but I used to work in a bakery (when I was in high school and college) and they rarely ever used fondant. Here's a link to their flickr album of wedding cakes if you want to look for inspiration. I'd say 98% of them are buttercream!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/claysbakery/albums/72157607154415423

We mixed two cake designs she had in her display binder. Nothing fancy. The bakery was paid on behalf of us by the venue, so if we didn't choose their bakery, we would pay the venue the same price and get the amount in something else. Then we would pay a different bakery for our cake. But we went with the bakery the venue uses to make things easy, and they tasted good compared to the other places in the area.

ETA: It's buttercream. I wasn't a cake topper that had a bride, groom and a pit bull, but DH didn't think it was nice enough. I gave him about a year to find a topper he liked and he didn't did, so this cake topper was like $2 from a craft store, purchased the week of the wedding because DH wanted a topper on the cake. I really didn't care either way. But I left it up to him since he was so picky on the topper.

Hahaha VM, I didn't even realize we did the same thing for our cakes.

I honestly never even consulted with the baker. I don't like cake and didn't care about what it looked like. I dropped off 2 styles of ribbon (and did the same with the florist), and thought they would just pick whichever one looked best but they used both, alternating between the 4 tiers. I probably would have preferred they used only 1 style, but whatever, it was all about the topper anyway.

Oh my goodness I love all of these cakes!! I haven't even begun to decide what I'm doing with mine yet.

All I did was buy the nautical ribbon! I put the topper and the flowers on myself. That is the ONE thing that pissed me off. I came into the room and she had half ass put the topper on and the flowers were still sitting there. That's okay, I got to do it myself. hahah #anal

Ugh I hate the taste of fondant! Here is ours... It's the only pic I have of it as our pro pics haven't come back yet!

Here was our buttercream

I didn't care what our cake looked like either, so he did a very old-school piping on the edge, but a ton of greenery and you don't really notice the frosting.

This was our cake with buttercream frosting.

All buttercream

DH Hates Fondant so he asked for whipped cream frosting. It was delicious!!!