| Now that I've tried to find a source of inter-racial cake toppers on the Web, I understand much better why so many couples opt for fresh flowers, fancy icing, or big glass hearts rather than the old-fashioned "couple" topper . Cake-topper couples seem to come from the Barbie and Ken universe circa 1972, when the lone African-American doll had to be provided with an equally ebony-skinned Ken-equivalent or she wouldn't be allowed to date. Asians and Hispanics are completely absent. I did succeed in finding some wWeb sources of inter-racial couples. The going rate for a customized cake topper seems to be around $ 80, which is more than I'd pay for one, but not the highest price I've seen for frothy bits of glass and lace with no people. If you have children, the topper has decent potential as a family heirloom, since you can't exactly buy one in every wedding boutique. A quick search on Google for "inter-racial cake toppers" yields good results. Plaide Palette paints the topper to look like the couple, but the groom seems to be limited to a tux or suit, and the people all have Caucasian facial features. If you're not happy with the selection or cost for ordinary customized cake-toppers, you can make your own without a great deal of craft skill. The base is simply a circle of thin wood, available at any large craft store, painted white or covered with white fabric. You can trim it with lace if you like. For greater stability, you can glue short dowels to the bottom so that the dowels sink into the cake when you put the topper on. Glue pre-gathered lace around the edge if you like the lacy look; a bit of narrow ribbon covers the inner edge of the lace. If you want an arch behind the couple, you can buy little plastic ones at craft stores (paint them to look less plastic), or you can use any small-scaled silk vine that has wire in the stems. Just bend the wire into the shape you want. There are all sorts of bells, flowers, and other goodies you can add. For people, you have a few choices. You can buy a plastic bride and a plastic groom and paint them to suit yourself-at the scale of the plastic figures, the features look like no racial group ever found on earth anyway, so you're both sacrificing accuracy evenly. A better approach, however, might be to use dollhouse figures: not the plastic kind at big toy stores, but the more elegant cloth and wired sort that serious miniature collectors use to populate their little scenes. You can find these at "better" dollhouse stores. I've seen African-American figures, even though I live in a city that is not particularly racially diverse. You can usually buy people individually, so you may be able to put together a bride and a Marine and be done.
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