Your wedding cake is perhaps the greatest gastronomic extravagance of your life, a fact which Katie Watts of Couture Cakes knows only too well. Here, she divulges a few trade secrets for brides seeking the best possible wedding cake and advises how to ensure that you can have your cake and enjoy eating it too…

Of all the creative professions to be in, the most delicious must be that of a wedding cake artist! To find out a little more about just how much knowledge, effort and creativity goes into making your dream wedding or special occasion cake, we enlisted the help of Couture Cakes’ Katie Watts, based in South Lincolnshire, to gain an expert’s perspective on how to achieve the perfect wedding cake.

We watched as, step by step, Katie created a special occasion cake for Lincolnshire Pride, divulging a few hints and tips for choosing a cake artist along the way.

Katie’s studio itself is a feast for the eyes, displaying some of her fantastic creations. It is situated on Deeping St Nicholas’ Vine House Farm, a 2,000 acre conservation award winning farm with 200 acres dedicated to organic farming. Katie has lived on the farm all her life and as such, has come to appreciate the relationship between natural wholesome ingredients & great tasting food.

“It’s important that a cake tastes as good as it looks and one of the key elements to taste is the use of fine quality ingredients!” For that reason, Katie uses her farms own free range eggs, and organic wheat is harvested on the farm and taken to Maud Foster Windmill in Boston which produces flour for Katie cakes. Berries are also gown on the farm, which Katie uses to decorate chocolate cakes and produce homemade jam to sandwich her vanilla sandwich cakes.

Katie’s background has been fundamental to her belief in natural wholesome food. After studying a degree in Food & Nutrition Katie became a food technologist for Jordans Cereals, developing their range of healthy breakfast cereals and cereal bars, whilst also pursuing her creative flair by working as a Pastry (dessert) chef.

Recognising her talent, Katie was employed by one of the capital’s most prestigious sugar art and special occasion cake studios, but the pull of Lincolnshire was too strong, and Katie returned home in 2007 to set up Couture Cakes and work with clients in Lincolnshire as well as throughout Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire.