Today’s fair trade wedding cake has proved problematic to source online (hint, hint!). After numerous ‘fair trade wedding cake’ search engine results, I have only found two possible sources:

Fancy That! Wedding Cakes based in Oxfordshire. While they don’t mention a specific ‘fair trade wedding cake’ they do mention (advice page) couples requesting ‘ethical’ wedding cakes, with fair trade ingredients.

Virginia Sharp Couture Cakes based in Earlston, unfortunately however, I have experienced trouble accessing their own website: www.virginia-sharp.co.uk But in the Free Index it says: ‘Virginia Sharp offers organic and fair-trade ingredients as well as cakes suitable for vegans or those with special dietary requirements. A percentage of profits are donated to the benefit of fair trade.’

Therefore from today’s searching, it would seem that if you want a specialist to make your wedding cake it’s best to contact a local wedding cake supplier and ask if they can use fair trade ingredients - like the fair trade chocolate fountains I found for yesterday’s challenge.

Make Your Own
You could of course make your own fair trade wedding cake?

After searching ‘wedding cakes’ on the Internet it’s very easy to find design ideas, from the traditional wedding cake design, to a tower of cup cakes – we had 300 cup cakes for ours!

Also now that the number and variety of fair trade products have increased (see the Fairtrade Foundation for a list including: fruits, nuts, dried fruits, preserves, sugars, honey, coffee, and of course chocolate) there are many more fair trade recipes available. This then means a fair trade wedding cake could be a: fruit cake, chocolate cake, cheesecake, tart, torte, or even a mousse. Today I’ve found…

This Divine White Chocolate Cheesecake from Divine Chocolate Recipes, which has a wide selection of cake and dessert recipes. There’s also the online Fairtrade Cook Book that has a list of cake and dessert recipes on their Dessert; Party; and Ingredient pages. Additionally there’s the Fairtrade Foundation Recipes Page which includes: Fairtrade Chocolate Cake, Fairtrade Tiramisu, Chocolate Cake with CandiedGinger and Banana Choc Chip Muffins.

Alternatively why not have a browse through some of the fair trade cook books for inspiration. I found the following books at the Africa Book Centre: ‘Just Desserts: 50 Sweet Surprises With Fair Trade Ingredients’ by Ralf Kabelitz; ‘Cooking with Coffee: 60 Recipes Using Fair Trade Coffee’ by Lucas Rosenblatt, Judith Meyer and Edith Beckmann; ‘Desserts and Drinks: from Around the World’ Chunky Cookbook; and ‘A Fair Feast: 70 Celebrity Recipes for a Fairer World’ by Vicky Bhogal

With these and the other fair trade recipe books available (Africa Book Centre) it’s also easy to imagine a Fair Trade Wedding Feast. But as today sees the end of my search for fair trade food products for this challenge, I will have to come back to this idea another time!

See you tomorrow when I return for day 14 and my last challenge!

Alex