Wedding cakes are breaking out of yesteryear's all-white molds. Today's cakes have personality, panache and, more than ever before, fantastic flavors.

"The wedding cake today is a real emotional decision," said Margaret Lastick, owner of Le Royale Icing in Oak Park, Ill., custom supplier of wedding cakes for all the major hotels in Chicago.

"The two items in a wedding that tell people why they're at the event are the bride's dress and the wedding cake," she added.

When customers come to Lastick to design their wedding cake, "They want to be different somehow. The cake can be traditional, but they want it to have a personalized twist," she said.

One trend she notices today is the return of the cake top -- variations on the little bride and groom that stand atop the highest layer.

"For years, brides and grooms were not interested in the traditional bride-and-groom cake top," said Lastick. "Now I'm finding as long as something is very personalized and unique, I'm asked more and more to put a cake top on a wedding cake."

A recent example she created for one couple was a cake top of tiny Limoges frog boxes. "They were gorgeous and very cute, and a very elegant look because they were Limoges boxes. Then I handmade flowers out of sugar and a lily umbrella over the frogs. It actually looked absolutely gorgeous," she said.

She said she's one of the few bakers in Chicago that still does sugar flowers. "You can eat them, but generally people want to save them. They can bring them back to me and I can make a bouquet and put them in a dome setting they can keep for a lifetime," said Lastick.

But as for the cake itself, her customers want to eat it.

"Ninety-five percent of my customers want the wedding cake for dessert. It's very important what it tastes like," she said. "They want dessert-size slices, not little slivers to put into boxes to take home. They want a good-size piece of cake that's actually a plated dessert with little flowers or sauces or pieces of fruit on a decorated plate."

Flavor is decidedly the driving force behind Karen Krasne's Extraordinary Desserts shop in San Diego. The holder of a certificate de patisserie from Paris' Le Cordon Bleu, Krasne has been wowing couples with her wedding cakes for nine years.

"Our top seller now is a Passion Fruit Ricotta Torte. It's three pound-cake layers soaked with passion fruit juice and layered with passion fruit whipped cream, kiwifruit, strawberries and bananas," said Krasne. "It's a light cake, very fragrant, and I don't think there's a person who doesn't like it."

Her second top seller is called Moka, three layers of very dark bittersweet chocolate cake soaked with coffee and separated with espresso-infused chocolate mousse, caramel and pecan espresso pralines.

Then there's her White Chocolate Linzer Torte, a hazelnut almond cake with white chocolate butter cream, fresh raspberries, homemade raspberry preserves and nut meringue; the flavor choices at Extraordinary Desserts are as luscious as the cake's presentation.

"Our signature look is fresh flowers or fresh greens. We like it to look as though it's natural, in that organic garden idea," said Krasne.

Some of her stellar wedding cake designs have showcased seven layers with real pink anthuriums and tiny white orchids; layers wrapped entirely in sugared pansies; tiers of cake dressed tuxedolike with really smooth frosting punctuated with real ribbon in the same color, then pressed with bright-red rose petals while the top layer is covered with bright-red rosebuds; or those same tuxedo-style tiers festooned with leaves in the colors of fall.

"I'm trying to get out of the pillar thing," said Krasne. "I'm trying to avoid having any plastic pieces on the cakes, trying to keep them very organic."

And judging by the winners in the 1996 Domaine Carneros Sparkling Wine Wedding Cake Contest in Napa, Calif., whimsy can define a wedding cake as well.

Mike McCarey of Amazing Cakes in Redmond, Wash., won the grand prize for his "King Kong & Fay Wray Cake" -- a banana caramel cake replicated to look like New York's Chrysler Building, with a chocolate King Kong scaling the building while grasping Fay Wray in his hand.

Richard Ruskell of The Phoenician Hotel in Scottsdale, Ariz., won first prize in the celebrity category for his "Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde" entry -- a double-tower wedding cake consisting of four black and white oval-shape tiers intertwined in a yin-yang pattern, each side decorated with gum paste flowers and Mexican paste stencil.