For many couples one of the great things about getting married today is the fact that they are no longer bound by the customs and traditions that ruled the arrangements for their parents' wedding, but are able to plan a wedding that very much suits their own personalities and lifestyles. But what about those couples who are planning a military wedding?

The basis of a military wedding is of course no different to any traditional white wedding in terms of the format of the wedding and the following reception, with a addition of some traditions that are peculiar to military weddings in general and to weddings from within individual corps or units in particular. This can make it somewhat more difficult to stamp your own personality on your wedding, but there are areas of the wedding, such as your wedding cake, where you can still be more than a little creative.

Whether it's a military wedding or not, there's nothing to say that you have to have a traditional circular white wedding cake. Nowadays cakes come in all flavors, shapes, sizes and colors and there's no reason at all why you shouldn't have your own military cake.

If the kids can have birthday cakes shaped like dinosaurs, then why shouldn't you have a wedding cake in the shape of an aircraft carrier or a Hercules? The problem of course is that your wedding cake needs to be very much a focal point of your reception and this means that it needs to have height – hence the tradition of building cakes into tiers. Your aircraft carrier may well be big enough to feed your assembled guests (and of course to put the bridge away in the freezer for the christening of your first child) but it will not have the dramatic effect that can only really be found by giving a cake height.

In most cases the answer is to choose a cake that you like in terms of flavor and color, but to stick with a fairly conventional shape (round, square, octagonal etc.) and to tier the cake in several layers to give you the required height. Then you can add the final personalization by finishing the cake off with one of the many military wedding cake toppers available today.

Here you could of course have your aircraft carrier or Hercules, but perhaps a safer, but no less personal, choice would be to have representations of yourselves complete with your chosen wedding dress and dress uniform.

The days of the cheap plastic replicas of the bride and groom are long gone and you can now have extremely realistic figures crafted which will match the bride's dress and bouquet, and even her hair, as well as dressing you in the correct uniform complete with badges of rank and medal ribbons. Military wedding cake toppers today have become quite an art.

For more information about wedding cake toppers please visit Talking Weddings today.