One of the key focal pieces of any wedding is the cake. Sitting in splendor at the center of your reception, the cake is often the pinnacle of a couple's wedding theme. So just how much should you spend on this particular element of your wedding? Well, if you are baker Michael Burns from Ayrshire, Scotland, then no price is too high. He has just designed, baked and decorated the UK's largest and most expensive wedding cake for his marriage on Saturday 12^th December.

The cake, which reached a towering nine foot five inches, weighed several tonnes, and required a fork lift to transport it from his bakery to the venue. As the cake weighed several tons, the floor underneath it also had to be reinforced to prevent it from disappearing through the floorboards!

It took 3,000 eggs, 20 kilos of marzipan, and 20 bottles of rum to complete the giant cake, and the addition of thousands of Swarovski crystals and diamond decorations took the total value to a whopping one hundred and fifty thousand pounds (roughly two hundred and fifty thousand dollars).

Adding to the cost of the cake was the price of having a security guard watch over it at the wedding!

When asked why he felt compelled to such extravagance, Michael replied that he knew his friends would be expecting something spectacular, and hoped that this cake would impress them.

The fifteen layer wedding cake was large enough to feed twenty thousand people, and after the guests had had their fill the left overs were distributed as a sweet treat to local charities.