Eddie Spence, who put the royal icing on the cakes, dies at 91 (2024)

The 16-year-old apprentice was told to get bowls, eggs and a whisk. “I was given the job of hand-beating eggs,” recalled Eddie Spence. He spent all day at the job, churning away at scores of eggs, in his first peek into the craft of cakemaking for royalty.

Over the next seven decades, Mr. Spence was involved in nearly every major royal event — weddings, anniversaries, celebrations — as one of Britain’s most acclaimed cake decorators. His intricate artistry with icing was studied in culinary schools, featured in exhibitions and elevated him to a foodie celebrity along with the popularity of baking shows and competitions such as “The Great British Bake Off” (known as the “The Great British Baking Show” to U.S. audiences).

He received an honorary title in the Order of the British Empire, bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II more than a half-century after he beat the eggs for her wedding cake. And, in one of the more delightful breaks in protocol, Mr. Spence called the queen “pet” at the medal presentation ceremony in 2000.

“I said, ‘Thanks, pet.’ I always call everybody ‘pet,’ and of course, right away she laughed,” recalled Mr. Spence, who died July 2 at his home in Bournemouth, England, at 91.

The wedding cake for Elizabeth and Philip made by Mackie’s — one of 12 cakes from different bakers — was a four-tiered, six-foot tower inspired by Edinburgh’s monument to the early 19th-century writer Sir Walter Scott.

The white icing and floral flourishes took nearly a week to apply. Mr. Spence was given an opportunity to assist with the decoration, according to a history of royal cakemaking. “His hands [were] covered in blisters from the task,” the account said. (The main wedding cake, made by McVitie & Price outside London, was nine feet tall and yielded more than 2,000 slices.)

After the wedding, Mr. Spence became a self-taught scholar of royal cake decorations, studying past designs from the Victorian era and earlier as well as the various techniques for the specific approach known as royal icing.

The more common sugar paste and fondant frostings remain soft. Royal icing, which can include meringue powder, hardens when cooled and can be used to create rigid designs or coatings (such as on gingerbread houses) or high-gloss, plaster-smooth surfaces.

“There’s nothing to beat royal icing,” Mr. Spence said on British talk show “Loose Women” as he demonstrated how to squeeze out perfect braids of icing from a confectioner’s piping bag.

In early 1960, he received a letter from Queen Elizabeth’s sister, Princess Margaret, asking for a “traditional” cake when she married Antony Armstrong-Jones later that year. “So that’s what we did,” he told the Daily Mail.

The cake became one of Mr. Spence’s favorites, he said. Each of the six-sided tiers featured either a stylized floral pattern, a royal crest or a monogram of “M” and “A,” the couple’s initials.

Nothing was simple about his next major royal project. For the queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, marking 25 years of her reign, Mr. Spence went rococo with a 56-pound cake in the form of a horse-drawn coach covered by a lavish royal icing veneer in gold, red and purple, which was carved in painstaking detail right down to the simulated wood grain on the carriage wheel spokes.

For the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer, Mr. Spence returned to more classic lines with an eight-foot-tall, four-tier cake of glass-flat icing and royal symbols. The fruitcake interior, made by bakers who worked with Mr. Spence in Bournemouth, contained 180 eggs, 12 pounds of butter and two bottles of rum. Buckingham Palace dispatched a Rolls-Royce to Bournemouth, about 110 miles from London, to transport the cake and Mr. Spence’s team.

In 2021, a piece from one of the nearly two dozen other wedding cakes was sold for more than $2,500 at auction. The slice, showing the royal coat of arms, had been kept in a tin box by a former member of the Queen Mother’s household.

Mr. Spence retired in 2018, saying his hands had become too shaky for the fine details needed in his work. He had just finished what would be his last royal commission, decorating the cake for the 70th wedding anniversary of Elizabeth and Philip in 2017. He adorned the cake with myrtle flowers made from sugar in remembrance of her wedding bouquet.

Apprentice at 14

Edward Millar Spence was born July 14, 1932, in Edinburgh. His father drove a delivery van, and his mother worked at Mackie’s bakery.

He left school at 13 because his family could not afford the fees. On his 14th birthday, he started at Mackie’s, which had a standing arrangement to supply treats such as petit fours and cakes for afternoon teas at the royal residence in Edinburgh, the Palace of Holyroodhouse.

He later decorated wedding cakes and other goods for the Mackie’s window display and taught cake-decorating classes at Napier Technical College (now Edinburgh Napier University). After Mackie’s closed in the late 1960s, he instructed aspiring pastry chefs in Derby and then Bournemouth, where he settled.

His 2010 book, “The Art of Royal Icing,” sought to pass along the details of the craft. One repeated tip: Be careful of high humidity, which can soften the icing.

Mr. Spence’s first wife, Betty Spence, died in 1999. Tracy Spence, whom he married in 2017, confirmed the death but did not note a cause. Other survivors include three children from his first marriage; two stepchildren; a brother; and seven grandchildren.

Mr. Spence often said he was not overly fond of cake himself. Yet he did indulge his sweet tooth. “I always have four teaspoons of sugar in my tea,” he said.