Wedding cakes with intricate designs, lace and scrollwork and cascades of sugar flowers — today’s brides are limited only by their imaginations, the cake designer’s talent and how much they want to spend. “Just about anything goes,” said Vera Dordick, owner of The Queen of Tarts, a bakery in Guilderland.

Brides also can choose from flavorful icings and luscious fillings. And if you can’t narrow your choice down to one cake, no problem. How about a bridal shower cake, a groom’s cake or even cupcakes to complement the wedding cake?

Colors also are hot on the wedding cake circuit. “Nobody wants a stark white cake anymore,” said Mona Sokhi of Mona’s Confections in Melville, Long Island. “They might want ivory or pale pink or even pale blue, but not white.” Vibrant accent colors in the sugar work also are popular, Sokhi said.

Dordick said that very few brides choose an all-white cake. “More and more, the personality of the bride and groom is reflected in the cake,” she said.

For example, a recent rustic wedding used chocolate fondant with a birch bark accent. “It fit the style of the wedding,” she said.

When the budget allows, a second custom-designed cake for the rehearsal dinner gets the nod. These groom’s cakes aren’t as formal as the wedding cake and usually are a more colorful, more whimsical cake, often themed around the groom’s interests.

In the South, it traditionally was chocolate or red velvet, cake designers say. In the movie “Steel Magnolias,” the red velvet groom’s cake was shaped like an armadillo. Dordick has made groom’s cakes in the shape of baseball caps, fish and, for a groom whose favorite flick was “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” she made a curved hill reminiscent of a scene in the movie with pumpkins and a beer keg added to reflect the couple’s interest in beer.

more sugar & fresh flowers

Jay Ellis, owner of Cakes by Jay in Glen Cove, Long Island, said he is seeing more sugar detailing and fresh flowers topping wedding cakes. Brides also are shelling out $300 to $400 for porcelain figures that sit next to the cake instead of on top of it, he said.

Cakes, which usually are priced per slice, range from an inexpensive $4 a slice to the average of $7 to $10 a slice, Ellis said. Details, such as cascading sugar florals and hand-molded and hand-painted decorations, can add from $1,000 to $5,000 to the price, he added. And top-name designers easily charge $10,000 or more for an elaborately decorated cake.

Dordick said the cost is contingent on how elaborate the design, the number of flowers and the scrollwork requested. “It can be $4.50 per slice or $14.50 per slice,” she said.

Just as brides have likes and dislikes, designers have strong feelings about what works and what doesn’t.

“I’m so glad the basket-weave cake is out,” Ellis says. “It was so ’90s. Any sort of plastic topper is out. Shortening in the icing is out. Cakes that look like they’re falling over are out. The tiered cakes where you see through the layers are out, out, out!”

Sokhi, who makes all of her fillings, dislikes plastic columns that go between layers. “They’re ugly; they make the cake unstable,” she said.

Dordick said that plastic is generally considered tacky by brides. Plastic figures on top of cakes have been replaced by porcelain, and the plastic columns that used to be standard are now a thing of the past.

“Unless the bride wants fresh flowers stuffed between each layer of the cake. Then, the plastic pillars are used, but you don’t see them because of the flowers,” she added.