Eddie Spence, wedding cakemaker who became the Royal family’s favoured icer – obituary
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Eddie Spence, who has died aged 91, was a notable “royal icer” in two senses: both as a master of the craft of royal icing, as the suspension of sugar in whipped egg white is known, and because he was behind a remarkable series of cakes for the Royal family.
The first was for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Prince Philip in 1947, when Spence was a 16-year-old apprentice at the Edinburgh baker JW Mackie on Princes Street, which held the Royal Warrant in Scotland for rusks and shortbread. Although Princess Elizabeth’s official wedding cake was being made by McVitie and Price, she accepted 11 other cakes from prominent confectioners, including Lyons, Huntley and Palmers and Mackie’s.
Spence, known as “Wee Eddie” because he was only 5ft tall, was asked to hand-beat the egg whites for the icing, which took him all day. Mackie’s six-foot-tall Gothic extravaganza, embracing architectural features from the Scott Monument in Edinburgh, was received in person by the princess and displayed in the Blue Drawing Room of Buckingham Palace before being disbursed to charities.
By 23 Spence was running the wedding cake operation at Mackie’s. He designed his next royal cake from scratch– this time, with rationing eased, one of 20 accepted – for the 1960 wedding of Princess Margaret to Antony Armstrong-Jones, which she instructed him had to be “traditional”. He also decorated a cake for Prince Charles’s wedding to Lady Diana Spencer (which he delivered in a Rolls-Royce), and one for Prince Andrew’s to Sarah Ferguson.
Spence observed that his supplying a cake to a royal wedding seemed to guarantee the failure of the marriage. One notable exception was Queen Elizabeth II, for whose golden wedding anniversary he was invited to ice the official cake (an honour that had hitherto eluded him). He based the design on Westminster Abbey, and the icing took him seven weeks: the bottom tier alone weighed one and a half hundredweight.
For her diamond wedding anniversary in 2017, Spence came out of retirement to ice another cake, baked by Pladis (which now owns McVitie’s), which he decorated with sugar myrtle flowers in an allusion to her wedding bouquet. While at Mackie’s, he would also supply the petit fours for her afternoon tea at Holyrood.
Royal icing is temperamental to mix, sets rock hard, and is trickier to work than roll-out sugarpaste (or fondant), which became an increasingly popular alternative. Eventually Spence published The Art of Royal Icing (2010) to preserve the secrets of his craft, of which the most elaborate testament was his cake for the Silver Jubilee in 1977, a recreation in sugar of the Gold State Coach.
Edward Miller Spence was born on July 14 1932 in a tenement on the Lawnmarket in Edinburgh, and christened in St Giles’s Cathedral by the Queen’s minister. He attended Darroch School, where Sean Connery was two years his senior, but like Connery he left formal education at 13 because his parents could not afford to keep all three of their children in secondary school. He was apprenticed to JW Mackie at 14.
By 22 he was Scotland’s youngest baking teacher, instructing at Napier College in Edinburgh and later in Derby, where he settled when Mackie’s closed at the end of the 1960s. In the 1980s he moved to Bournemouth and taught at Mary Ford’s sugarcraft school.
In 2010, he appeared on Loose Women, and his lifetime achievement was recognised at The Baking Industry Awards. He retired from sugarwork at the age of 85, when his hands became too shaky.
He was appointed MBE in 2000, and when Queen Elizabeth II praised his artistry, out of nerves he replied: “Thanks pet.”
He always had four spoonfuls of sugar in his tea.
Eddie Spence’s first wife, Betty, died in 1999. In 2017 he married Tracy, who survives him, along with three children from his first marriage.
Eddie Spence, born July 14 1932, died July 2 2024
