Definition of "wedding-cake" []

• Of or being a highly ornate architectural style. (adjective)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "The state of Minas Gerais is rooted in mining—its name translates prosaically as "General Mines"—and the gold and gems found there, including aquamarines and imperial topaz, built charming colonial towns like Ouro Preto, with its terra-cotta roofs and wedding-cake churches."
• "The two wedding-cake pulpits and the organ case opposite are as grand as can be, and interior so bracketed is the ne plus ultra of American colonial church architecture, plain and crisp and white, with exquisitely classical proportions."
• "Another problem: Many of the tall structures in midtown were built after World War II, when zoning laws were relaxed to allow modernist glass-windowed buildings to go straight up, with no frills or "setbacks," those wedding-cake layers on an earlier generation of skyscrapers that were thought to allow more sunlight onto the streets below."