Cake Included? - Depending on your reception venue, your cake may be included with your package. This is common in hotels and can save you time searching for a cake vendor. Sometimes though, they can refund you an amount for cake if you choose an outside vendor. My friend had this option, to get back $2000 to use an outside vendor or go with the preferred cake vendor, who was a well known for elaborate and delicious cakes. He chose to go with the preferred cake vendor and got a beautiful, ornately decorated cake. If that was me I would have taken the $2000 back and gotten a cheaper cake for $300! Yes, my actual wedding cake costed under $300. I would have used the $1700 for something else.Save on your cake - Wedding cakes can range anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars. If you want to trim your budget on your wedding cake, keep the design as simple as possible. Our wedding cake was simple white with 3 tiers with no gaps in between the tiers. Adding texture designs and colors onto the frosting adds to the cost. I've seen a lot of wedding cakes where the cake was decorated only with flowers like roses or orchids. Fresh flowers look better than piped flowers and look more modern. Our colors were dark pink and brown so we added a ribbon to the base of each tier to add color to our cake. The bakery didn't charge any extra for adding the ribbon which I supplied to them. It's a simple, inexpensive touch that I loved.
Display Cake - Keep in mind that the display cake is just that, for display and cake cutting. It need not be big enough to feed every guest. We got a display cake that fed about 94 people, the photo on the right. Then we had a few sheet cakes which cost only $75 a sheet and fed 50 people. The display cake cost the most, more than a sheet cake, obviously. So if you get a smaller display cake and purchase a few sheet cakes you can save a lot. The bakery will do the sheet cakes for you.
Number of Slices - The bakery will charge you based on the number of slices. The cost per slice on the display cake is a lot more than for a sheet cake. The bakery told us to account for only 80% of our guests eating cake, which is about right, because some guests simply don't eat cake. We felt better going with enough slices of cake for all of our guests. We had about 140 guests so we chose a display cake that had 94 slices, then added 1.5 sheet cakes (75 slices). It was more than enough, but also keep in mind that sometimes your reception venue will save the top portion of your display cake for you to bring home. So that 94 slices for our display cake wasn't really 94 slices for our guests.
Cake Flavors - We really enjoyed taste testing different flavors for our wedding cake and we got to take the samples home. We loved 2 cake flavors but settled on only one flavor for our wedding cake because we heard stories of when multiple cake flavors were available, guests would request more than one slice of cake, to try all of the flavors. So if you choose multiple flavors, then order more cake slices to accommodate this.
Cake Disaster - As someone who has been to countless weddings, I have actually seen a cake collape! This cake had 5 layers , with each tier held up by wine glasses. Thankfully, the cake was made of styrofoam... kinda odd. They used sheet cakes to serve guests. That's why I always told my clients to stick to cakes with layers stacked on top of each other instead of raised tiers.
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