CAKE-CUTTING TIME

Consider cutting and serving your wedding cake during a break in dancing, NOT right after dinner. Let’s say you have a 5:00 ceremony and a 6 to 10:00 reception (cocktails at 6:00, dinner at 7:00, dancing at 8:00). A good time for cake-cutting would be 9:00 – after about one hour of dancing.

Here's why.

What I call "energy flow" is a key to your reception's success. By the end of dinner, your guests have spent three hours watching your ceremony, standing around for cocktails, sitting down and eating. Now it’s time to get them up and moving -- to get that energy flowing!

If, instead, they continue to sit and eat cake, they might be less likely to get up and dance. After all that sitting and standing around, yet another serving of rich food is likely to make them feel drowsy, less energetic. (We all know that sleepy feeling after a huge meal.)

Also, it's considered rude to leave a wedding reception before cake-cutting, but permissible to leave anytime after. Cutting the cake roughly halfway through the dance period ensures all guests will stick around for at least the first hour of dancing -- even those who need to depart before the night is over (elderly relatives, parents of young children, guests with long drives home).

Of course, there may be reasons you or your caterer prefers to serve the cake immediately after dinner, and that's okay. But in my experience, a later cake-cutting works best.