Cakes have a secret

GRANDVILLE, Mich. — Wedding to-do list:

Rent the hall — check.

Rent the tuxes — check.

Rent the cake — check?

That’s right — a new business allows couples to rent decorated Styrofoam wedding cakes for less than half the cost of the same cake made from scratch.

“They’re covered in exactly what a real cake would be covered in — fondant and gum paste,” said Kimberly Aya, owner of Fun Cakes. “The only difference is the inside. Nobody can tell.”

Aya, 50, fully intended to bake and decorate beautiful cakes for her Fun Cakes customers, and she still offers that service. But brides kept looking for ways to save money.

“They kept asking for the fake cakes,” Aya said. “I had never heard of the idea.”

Fake cakes are not new, but renting them out is fairly novel.

Susan Lobsinger and her partner opened Rent the Cake of Your Dreams in East Aurora, N.Y., last year. She said she knows of only one other cake rental business — in Canada.

But the trend is emerging.

“We’re growing all the time, and people are recommending us,” Lobsinger said.

Aya did her research and launched cakerental.com in March. Working in fondant and gum paste as opposed to traditional frosting makes the cakes durable and reusable, she said.

For Grand Rapids bride-to-be Nicole Kreuger, 26, it was the perfect solution.

She ran into Aya at a bridal show. “I had told her we had wanted to do a small cake, inexpensive but creative, with sheet cakes in the back,” said Kreuger, a graphic designer who will wed Rudy Fleminger in September.

“She told me about this idea to do fake cakes, and I thought it was brilliant. … I could have the cake of my dreams and still stay in my price range.”

So, what about the cake-cutting ceremony?

Aya has a secret spot on the cake reserved for one real slice of cake for the bride and groom. It is slipped into place, at the base layer and under the fondant sugar paste frosting.

“So they can cut that at the ceremony and feed each other wedding cake,” she said.

And normally, the cake then is wheeled to the kitchen to have it cut and served. So guests don’t need to know the rest of the cake was fake.