I received a few emails yesterday on the "Centerpiece Cakes" article. It seems some guests are not fans of centerpiece cakes. I'll share their stories so brides who are contemplating centerpiece cakes can think about how they might handle some of these stories.
Sandy was a guest at a wedding that had different flavored cakes on the tables. If your cake had chocolate cake and you wanted carrot cake, you were expected to roam from table to table trying to trade your chocolate for carrot. Sandy said the bride's idea was to get everyone to intermingle and "get to know each other".
Sandy told me, "I work with the bride and I'm never going ever meet her family or the groom's family again. I have no need to get to know them. I thought she humilated her guests by practically making them go table to table and begging for food. Because that's what it looked like to me ... that they were begging for cake from other people."
Stephen shared the story of the bride and groom who followed many magazine suggestions and went from table to table, cutting the cakes themselves for their guests. Said Stephen, "I understand how this enabled the couple to meet and greet each guest, and if this had been a small wedding of 100 or so, it might have worked. But when you have 325 guests, this takes a while, and those in the far corners of the room, who had to wait for their cake to be cut, were getting peeved. Especially those who had small children who were just too impatient to get their cake. Sitting next to a table of crying kids was not fun for the other guests."
Liz said the people at her table didn't realize it was a real cake that was going to be cut for dessert, so their cake was full of finger holes where people poked it. Liz passed on dessert because she "...wasn't about to eat finger-poked cake!"
T.J. loved the centerpiece cakes and the guests cut their own cakes. "I just felt bad for the bride and groom because every table had about half of the cake leftover and I just kept wondering how they were going to store a bunch of half-cut cakes or if they were just going to throw it all away. Either way, it seemed like such a waste."
I've read articles with these very same suggestions to brides. These emails show me that an idea is one thing .... executing it is another.
My husband has a saying in his family about "Paper is a wonderful thing. It will just lay there and let you write ANYTHING on it." Which means, just because it works on paper, doesn't mean it works in reality.
As I mentioned in the previous blog, I think centerpiece cakes can look really nice on a guest table. Just be sure you have a great execution plan to serve your guests quickly and easily.
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Showing posts with label centerpiece cake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label centerpiece cake. Show all posts
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
Centerpiece Cakes .... Not Necessarily Cheaper
I'm frequently asked about centerpiece cakes .... small wedding cakes that double as the centerpiece on the guest tables, in place of a traditional 3 or 4 tiered wedding cake. Bridal websites and magazines are wrongly telling brides that this is a cheaper alternative.
Actually, a bride will most likely pay more for these cakes than she would a big wedding cake. LOTS more. I get very frustrated when articles in the magazines and websites, written by people who have never baked a wedding cake in their life, mislead brides with these kinds of suggestions.
As a cake baker AND a caterer, I’m astonished at the misconception that little food has a little price. Little food (like appetizers or mini cakes) take a lot more time and labor to create, so they usually come with a higher price tag. My rule-of-thumb is that if food is one-fourth the size, then it’s probably 4 times the price.
Making a lot of little cakes is much more labor intensive (read “higher cost”) than making one big cake … increased baking time, takes longer to decorate all of those smaller cakes than it does one big cake (read “Labor intensive” read “higher cost”), add’l supplies (20 cakes boxes instead of 3, more icing, more icing flowers for decor), transportation issues, the extra equipment needed to create a small tiered cake for each table, the extra labor to set up 20 little wedding cakes instead of one big one.
As a baker friend said to me, “With a 3 tier cake, I have to grease/flour and then wash 6 pans. With 20 little cakes, I have to grease/flour and then wash 40 pans. There’s a labor cost associated with doing that.”
A bride also ends up buying more cake than she needs. Wedding cake is sold “per serving” (like paint is sold per gallon and carpet is sold per yard). Let’s assume the bride wants a simple 8” two-layer cake on each table for her 160 guests. Normally you can sit 8 guests to a table, so there will be 20 tables, ergo 20 cakes. An 8” cake yields 24 wedding size servings. 20 cakes x 24 servings each = 480 cake servings. Remember, she only needed 160 servings.
Let’s just use $3.00 per serving for easy math. The individual cakes would cost $1440 (480 servings x $3 per serving). The standard regular wedding cake to serve her 160 guests would cost this bride $480 (160 servings x $3). She is not saving money with the mini’s ….. she is spending THREE TIMES the money by buying THREE TIMES the cake.
Even if your venue is charging you a $1 per person cake-cutting-fee, which would be $160 (160 guests x $1), you are still ahead by getting the larger, traditional cake.
Which reminds me ….. If you negotiate the cake cutting fee by having the guests cut the cake themselves, and if you have 20 cakes on 20 tables, be sure you buy 20 cake cutting knives – one per table – so the guests can have something to cut the cake. And how much do those run? $10-$12 each? More? Times 20? $12 each x 20 tables = $240. It’s cheaper to pay the $160 cake cutting fee.
Now that I’ve finished my lecture, let me concede one thing: If a bride chooses to buy the simple, mini cake from a grocery store bakery or a place that has a freezer full of a hundred small cakes where they can just pull them out and slap some icing on it, she might be able to get them cheaper.
There are concessions to be made if she goes this route, such as limited (if any) design or décor and how fresh the cake might be. If she goes with a local grocery store bakery, most of them do not deliver, so the bride must deal with picking up and setting up 20 cakes.
I think small cakes on the guest tables look very nice. And if it's in the budget, and it's what the bride wants, then go for it! Overall, when the centerpiece costs are factored in, there could be an overall cost savings for the bride. I just want the brides to walk in with eyes wide open and not be shocked when her custom designed table cakes are quoted at more than just ten bucks apiece.
.
Actually, a bride will most likely pay more for these cakes than she would a big wedding cake. LOTS more. I get very frustrated when articles in the magazines and websites, written by people who have never baked a wedding cake in their life, mislead brides with these kinds of suggestions.
As a cake baker AND a caterer, I’m astonished at the misconception that little food has a little price. Little food (like appetizers or mini cakes) take a lot more time and labor to create, so they usually come with a higher price tag. My rule-of-thumb is that if food is one-fourth the size, then it’s probably 4 times the price.
Making a lot of little cakes is much more labor intensive (read “higher cost”) than making one big cake … increased baking time, takes longer to decorate all of those smaller cakes than it does one big cake (read “Labor intensive” read “higher cost”), add’l supplies (20 cakes boxes instead of 3, more icing, more icing flowers for decor), transportation issues, the extra equipment needed to create a small tiered cake for each table, the extra labor to set up 20 little wedding cakes instead of one big one.
As a baker friend said to me, “With a 3 tier cake, I have to grease/flour and then wash 6 pans. With 20 little cakes, I have to grease/flour and then wash 40 pans. There’s a labor cost associated with doing that.”
A bride also ends up buying more cake than she needs. Wedding cake is sold “per serving” (like paint is sold per gallon and carpet is sold per yard). Let’s assume the bride wants a simple 8” two-layer cake on each table for her 160 guests. Normally you can sit 8 guests to a table, so there will be 20 tables, ergo 20 cakes. An 8” cake yields 24 wedding size servings. 20 cakes x 24 servings each = 480 cake servings. Remember, she only needed 160 servings.
Let’s just use $3.00 per serving for easy math. The individual cakes would cost $1440 (480 servings x $3 per serving). The standard regular wedding cake to serve her 160 guests would cost this bride $480 (160 servings x $3). She is not saving money with the mini’s ….. she is spending THREE TIMES the money by buying THREE TIMES the cake.
Even if your venue is charging you a $1 per person cake-cutting-fee, which would be $160 (160 guests x $1), you are still ahead by getting the larger, traditional cake.
Which reminds me ….. If you negotiate the cake cutting fee by having the guests cut the cake themselves, and if you have 20 cakes on 20 tables, be sure you buy 20 cake cutting knives – one per table – so the guests can have something to cut the cake. And how much do those run? $10-$12 each? More? Times 20? $12 each x 20 tables = $240. It’s cheaper to pay the $160 cake cutting fee.
Now that I’ve finished my lecture, let me concede one thing: If a bride chooses to buy the simple, mini cake from a grocery store bakery or a place that has a freezer full of a hundred small cakes where they can just pull them out and slap some icing on it, she might be able to get them cheaper.
There are concessions to be made if she goes this route, such as limited (if any) design or décor and how fresh the cake might be. If she goes with a local grocery store bakery, most of them do not deliver, so the bride must deal with picking up and setting up 20 cakes.
I think small cakes on the guest tables look very nice. And if it's in the budget, and it's what the bride wants, then go for it! Overall, when the centerpiece costs are factored in, there could be an overall cost savings for the bride. I just want the brides to walk in with eyes wide open and not be shocked when her custom designed table cakes are quoted at more than just ten bucks apiece.
.
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