And You Wonder Why I Don't Make Wedding Cakes?

In March, my nephew married his long-time girlfriend Jessica.  They were not having a church wedding.  In fact, they invited anyone who wanted to come, down to the courthouse to watch.  It was a Tuesday (they wanted to be married on the date of their first date) so I had to miss the ceremony, but I was able to drive down after work (2.5 hours away) for the evening get-together at a restaurant, spend the night & drive back for work the next day. LONG DAY.

I offered to make them a small cake for the dinner party. I was making our daughter's "Attack on Titan Cake" at the same time as prepping for their cake, which had to be delivered 3 days after Isabel's skate party.  It was a busy week.

The figures were for the AoT cake, the flowers for the wedding cake.

I finish up MONDAY NIGHT and take this picture.

I am pretty proud of my work, considering it's the second wedding cake I've ever made.   As I go to move this very top-heavy cake plate for a better picture, it starts to topple to the right. I see is falling in slow motion.  I grab it with my hands before it hits the table.  And then I just start to panic.

It's 8 p.m. and I have to deliver this cake the next day!

This is what I had to fix.  I was in a panic, but worked through to 10:30 p.m. fixing what I could.

I drove it to S. Florida, met them at the restaurant where (TWO HOURS LATER -long story) we were seated and I set up the cake with their cake topper.

Wedding Cakes Revisited: Pricing and Expectations

I won't do wedding cakes.  I've mentioned this before.  I don't have the time, nor the space, nor the guts to do them.  On one of the most important days of a woman's life, I will not be the cause of someone's high expectations gone to pot.

I've made exactly one wedding cake; my sister's.  It was slightly tilted, but she helped and still loved it.  She can overlook flaws. That's what sisters are for.  And it was free to boot.

I recently got asked if I would help someone out to" save money" on a wedding cake for 450 guests.  Four hundred and fifty guests, and they came to me to see if I could help cut costs.  The average is anywhere between 100-200 guests.

I was shocked.  And not at the same time.  People really just do not understand cake pricing at all, so I can't blame them.  At the same time though, I am taken aback that someone thinks I am o.k. helping someone else I don't know save money by spending easily 20 hours (for a cake for 450!)  of my personal time to do this.  I have a full-time job.  Prepping would take weeks, because it would have to be done on my nights and weekends.  My personal time.

When I bake, I am baking out of pure love for the people I am helping.  I bake and create these fun cakes just to see their faces.  Makes me so proud and so happy.   I LOVE seeing my sister's, my friends', my co-workers', my nieces'/nephews' faces when I present them with this bit of my love in cake form.

I know that I am not a professional baker.  My many, MANY mistakes and failures that I publicly post on this blog are proof. I'm not scared to show you all I'm human.  What I am not is someone that will do something for free or cheap, just because I am *not* a professional,  because guess what? For every failure, I have 5-6 successes that I am SO proud of.  I have skilllllzzzz.

So let me educate ya'll on wedding cake pricing, okay?

EVERY baker will quote differently.  Buddy from Carlo's  (I love your skills and your show, Buddy)  is going to charge WAY more than the local bakery down the street.

What we do quote the same, though, is a "per slice" price.  Bakers range from anywhere in the $1.50 to $3/per slice range for plain old vanilla cake with butter cream frosting and maybe  some sugar flowers to $4-$10 per slice for fondant, custom figures, custom shapes etc.

PER SLICE PRICE for 450 people.  Do the math.  This is a really big wedding.  The average is anywhere between 100-200 guests.  This is 450.  This is not your average wedding. This is way above average.

Buttercream Cakes:
$1.50 (SUPER CHEAP)  x 450 = $675
$3.00 x 450 people = $1,350  ( and this is my "rate", and mine are with fondant!! Fondant pricing below.)

Special cakes (fondant, gumpaste, figures, unique designs, labor intensive):

$4.00 x 450 = $1,800
$5.00 x 450 = $2,250

etc. etc.

You're seeing these prices, yes?  Know what we hear?  "What? I can get a cake at Walmart for $50!"  (not a wedding cake, you can't.  Also, Publix's wedding cakes will run you about $200-$300 to serve 100-200 people, and that's buttercream.)  The reply?   Well then you, ma'am, will have a Walmart cake at your wedding.  You will not have a custom-made cake that someone spent 10, 15, 20 hours on.  You will save money and have yourself a nice cake.  What you won't have is what you're hoping for and see on tv and in bridal magazines.  Hey, I'm not knocking Walmart cakes, or Publix cakes (and I LOVE ME some Publix cakes) but if you want something spectacular, you're going to have to pay for it.


I seriously doubt 450-people wedding couple are going to want to spend $1350.  Heck, even if I was uber-crazy and said "I will make you a small fondant cake. Then I will make you tons of sheet cakes you can hide in the kitchen and I will do this for $675 (the $1.50 a slice rate that's crazy-cheap)," I doubt they would do that. They're calling me to save money.  I cannot help them. What I can do is prepare them for the shock they're about to meet up with.

Let's look at cake serving sizes now.  We are not talking a big ole pie wedge here.  If you don't know this, now you do.  Wedding cake servings are small.

Two inches by two inches!  Tiny pieces!

If I am reading this one right, these servings are even smaller
than the picture above this picture.  They want 450 servings!
 Look at # 9.  That's not even half the guest list!

Here's someone's pricing chart I found.  $990 for 180 people for a 3 tiered
fondant cake.

The cake would have to be a tower.  This is not realistic.  Your best bet is to have a nice small 2 or 3 tiered cake (4", 6", 8".  It's small.  About 26 to 46 servings, depending on how you cut it. Teeny teeeny to get 46 out of that) or any of the permutations in the second picture, remembering that the bigger you go, the more $$ you're spending.  Then have several flat sheet cakes in the kitchen ready to be cut. The baker could probably give you a better per-slice rate for those.  You're still looking at a little over $600 for all this.

OR, you bake your own flat sheet cakes and then spend about $150-$200 on a small, pretty decorated cake made by your decorator.

Just a little education so you understand why cakes are so darned expensive.  You're not paying just for the flour, eggs, butter and sugar, the cake boards and the dowels.  You're paying for that expensive fondant, the gumpaste and most importantly, the decorator's time and skill.

My Sister's Cake, Wedding Day

Congratulations to my sister

Brenda and my brother-in-law Freddy!

Hello!

My Sister's Cake, Day 2 & 3

Day 2, Wednesday, was pretty much the same as day 1. The same exact recipe, the same exact pans. Oh, I made strawberry filling.

Day 3 was not Thursday. On Thursday we spent the day at Island's of Adventure with friends. Day 3 was Friday. I baked two 10"x3" chocolate cakes. I also made three batches of butter cream icing and one batch of peanut butter icing.

I torted and filled the two 12" cakes with the strawberry filling, stacked them together and crumb-coated (dirty iced) them.

I also stacked and covered the chocolate cakes in peanut butter frosting, and stacked and covered the 8" cakes in butter cream frosting.

That night, my sister Brenda and our friend Heather came over to help finish decorating the cakes with the fondant I made this week, and the gumpaste flowers we had all 3 made in August.

Heather

This is the 12" cakes already on the cake board with butter cream shells on the border and wood dowels inside to support the top tiers. I will be taking the cakes over to the reception hall, two hours away and assembling them there. Wish us luck!

My Sister's Cake, Day 1

This cake, my sister's design, will be huge. The bottom tier is two 12"x3" almond butter cakes, each torted (is that a word?) and filled with strawberries, and then covered in buttercream icing.

The middle tier, two 10"x3" cakes, will be chocolate with peanut butter frosting.

The top tier, two 8"x3"cakes, will be the same as the bottom tier.

That's a lot of flippin' cake.

The pan for the bottom tier holds about 12 cups of batter. This meant my doubling my normal recipe and I ended up using 10 eggs, 6 sticks of butter, 5 cups of sugar, 6 cups of flour, vanilla and almond extracts, baking powder, salt and milk. For. One. Cake. Which I have to do again tomorrow.

I did have enough batter to make one of the 8" top layer cakes. Not as tall as normal, but I might be able to make do without creating yet another batch (after the second batch tomorrow.)

I need to empty the fridge, or borrow someone's. Holy Moly.

Wedding Cake Redux

Remember that post where I said I would not do a wedding cake? Right. Well, immediately after that post, my older sister calls and asks me if I would be available to do a wedding cake in October. I told her no, that I was sorry but I was not comfortable making a wedding cake for anyone and to say sorry to whoever had asked her to ask me. She then said "No silly, for ME."

She getting married on 10/10/10.

AAAAAAAAAAACCCCCKKKKKKKKK!

I agreed but told her not to be mad if I mess it up. She poo-poo'd the idea of me messing it up.

This weekend, she and our friend Heather came up to help with making gumpaste flowers for her cake (hence the roses from the previous post.) The roses were actually the hardest thing, because she chose very simple 1-D flowers.

We made a practice mini-cake while they were here. The one she wants will be three layers, taller (more cakes stacked atop each other per level) and hopefully not as crappy.

I look pretty exhausted. (We had a full day of going to the cake supply store down in Orlando, then Michael's, then lunch, then drive back and go to Wal-Mart to grocery shop, to then bake a cake, clean the cake mess, prepare mini-meatloaves and mashed potatoes, then clean up the dinner mess, then start decorating the cake. )

Our friend Heather.

Then, of course, we ate. :)

Will You Do My Wedding Cake?

I've been asked that question twice already. It scares me to death. The first time I answered yes, to a friend of a co-worker of my husband. Then the co-worker got fired two days later and I never heard from "friend of the co-worker" again. Phew! Cool.


The second time, I told my friend "No."


How can I possibly make a cake for THE MOST IMPORTANT DAY OF YOUR LIFE?!?


The thought gives me hives.


Between driving and work, I am away from home 10 hours a day. By the time I get home, I have to worry about dinner, dishes, making sure the laundry gets done, the kids take their baths, etc. etc.


When I bake a cake for someone, I'm not sure they understand the sacrifice of my time and sleep. I do it for the fun and practice, but it takes a toll. I only have one oven and one fridge. Most cakes you see out & about that are really tall are two or three cakes stacked together per level. For instance, the graduation cake was 3-levels; 12", 8" and a ball pan. The 12" level consisted of two 12" cakes. I own one 12" pan. A 12 inch x 3" cake takes over an hour and ten to an hour and thirty minutes, for the one large cake. I had to do that twice. In the meantime, the middle layer is 8" x 3". I have two 8" x 3" pans, BUT the baking temp and times are different from the 12" pan, so I can't bake them together. Same with the ball pan.



Having one oven limits the amount of cakes I can bake at a time. Having a full-time job limits the amount of time I have in a day to bake. Then, there's the fridge. For the graduation cake, I was throwing away leftovers in order to fit 5 cakes in there.

I wish I had room to bake and freeze cakes for later use. I don't, and the thought of making a cake and having it FAIL or FALL and my not having any back-up cakes freaks me out to no end.

So, until the day comes that I can have a stockpile of cakes, butter cream and fondant at the ready, plus lots and lots and lots of practice...I'm not making that wedding cake.

Words Fail (a Cake Wreck)

I am by no means professional. I was pretty much self-taught until I took two Wilton classes last fall. I've only made silly/cutesy cakes. I wanted to try something new and classy.



I also decided to try a new recipe at the same time as being new and exciting with the decorating.



I am an idiot.

The cake itself was very tasty. I got this recipe from Cake Central. It was like eating a soft Oreo. The problem was they all broke coming out of the pans. All 4. In the soft cake, I placed a strawberry filling. Then I decided to try a new icing recipe; chocolate ganash. So, new cake, filled with strawberry, & new icing.

All is well, sort of, until I try to ice it with buttercream. The broken parts broke even further. The cakes were leaning. The home made fondant was sticking, the ganache was oozing from under the fondant. ARGH!!!!

I gave up.






I didn't want red icing. I wanted a red ribbon, but the ganache made it impossible.

It's also "bowl-shaped because there was no way to carve this cake level. It tore.

Words failed me. Oh wait. They didn't.





If at first you don't succeed...


pitch a fit, swear you're never trying a fancy cake again and go to bed angry.

Then wake up, breathe and know you will try again.