If you’ve been shopping for wedding cakes recently, you’re probably wondering why they’re so expensive. But are they really that expensive? What’s involved in pricing a wedding cake?
Read on to see what’s involved in pricing wedding cakes and you might understand more about why they cost what they cost.
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The biggest party you’ll ever throw.
If you’re having a large wedding, this could be the biggest party you’ll ever throw for your friends and family.
Entertaining a large number of people is expensive just because it’s a large number of people. If you want to cut costs, cut your guest list, because that will drop the price of everything!
The reality is that if you’re taking 150 out to dinner at a restaurant and then bought them all dessert for $8 each, it would cost $1200 for the dessert alone.
If you buy a wedding cake to serve 150 people it probably won’t be that expensive, depending on where you are and what kind of cake you order, but it could if you want a very specific, personalized design.
And it’s not making the cake that you’re paying for, it’s making the cake plus everything else that goes into it. So let’s go over what that involves.
Behind the scenes: Planning and preparation.
Wedding cakes usually involve a lot more planning than a regular birthday cake. Think about it…If you buy a birthday cake you might go to the grocery store or a bakery and just pick something up that’s been made ahead using a commercial cake mix and decorated with a general message on it.
If you get it personalized, it’s usually to have a name or custom message written on it, but it doesn’t substantially change the way the basic cake is made or decorated.
Wedding cakes are totally different. The biggest cost of making a wedding cake is time, and they take a lot of time from start to finish.
To see an article with a full time and cost breakdown about making your own wedding cake, click here.
Consultations and client communication.
For a wedding cake, the cake decorator/baker will first need to talk to the customer to design a cake that fits their theme and aesthetic. That might take in-person consultations or a lot of back-and-forth over email or phone calls.
The decorator will need to do sketches of the cake design for the customer to approve, and there might also be an initial tasting appointment for the flavors of the cake to be decided.
If the customer wants additional flavors of cake to try (and if the baker offers this) that’s an additional service with more specific cake combinations to be put together and the time that it takes to do that.
There are also contracts to be written up and sent, and there will be more planning to be done throughout the entire time between booking the cake and the wedding day.
All of these things aren’t directly related to baking and decorating the cake but they play a role in the wedding cake process, so the time they take to do is part of the wedding cake price. Wedding clients take a lot more contact and communication than a birthday cake does.
Quality of ingredients and sourcing.
When I was making wedding cakes I baked everything from scratch and I used premium ingredients. That means that I ordered things from specialty food catalogs because I couldn’t find them in the stores.
Better ingredients cost more, but after you eat the better ingredients you don’t want to eat the cheap ones. My clients were willing to pay a little more for a scratch-baked, no-cake-mix cake with premium ingredients bacause you could really taste the difference.
If you choose a basic wedding cake from a grocery store you’ll definitely save money but the quality of the cake won’t be anything that your guests remember or even eat.
I can guarantee, though, that if you serve a wedding cake that tastes good, people will eat it, and your guests will appreciate that you decided to serve them something nice.
Click here for an article about using dummy cakes to save costs.
Customization and design complexity.
If you want a custom cake it will cost more because you’re basically asking someone to do design work that’s specifically for you.
If the decorator has to come up with a brand-new design that will take time, and time is one of the things you’re paying for. The more changes you make, the more time it will take, and the more it will cost if the decorator charges a design fee.
Once the design is complete, it has to be made. So if the design that you settle on is very complicated or if it’s something that will take a lot of time to do, it can cost more, depending on how the decorator charges.
When I did cakes I didn’t charge extra for design elements, but some bakers start with a base price then add things on for every type of decoration you want to add. If you want things like gumpaste flowers, they might even charge per flower.
And some designs that you might think are “simple” are harder to execute well.
Wedding cakes with plain, smooth white icing can be a lot harder to do than cakes that have piping or another decorations, since the sides will have to be perfectly smooth.
That’s not an easy look to achieve, so don’t assume that some designs will always cost less than others.
Size and Serving Capacity.
The size of the cake will also (obviously) affect the final price. But it’s not the ingredient cost that’s the biggest factor here.
How the cake is built, the number of tiers it has, and the number of servings it contains will all factor into the price.
If the cake has an unusual structure that needs special engineering that will probably cost more. The cake in the photo above was made with stand-up royal icing snowflakes hiding the spaces between the tiers.
That involved making the snowflakes and decorating the cake after assembling it at the reception site since you can’t put that kind of thing together before moving it.
Some cakes had gravity-defying elements or things that are fragile (like the snowflakes) so they need extra attention.
Even a cake that’s an average stacked style needs to be done correctly or it can fall over.
My friends and I once spent our time at a wedding reception watching the cake lean over more and more throughout the evening. If the decorator had built it correctly it wouldn’t have been at risk for destruction!
How many servings a cake has will also make a price difference. In general you only need about 80% of the number of guests for the number of cake servings because not everyone will have a piece.
However, if you know that your friends and family are giant cake hogs and will want two pieces each, you might need to order a larger wedding cake. Deciding this is going to affect how much you spend in the same way that buying people dessert at a restaurant would.
You can have a larger cake by using dummy cakes for some of the tiers, but it might not save that much money. This article about dummy cakes goes over the cost of that.
Baking and assembly process.
Regardless of whether your cake is baked from scratch or not, the baker will have to plan for buying ingredients and will have to do the shopping and recipe prep, which all take time.
I used to do my shopping list for all of the ingredients that I needed at the beginning of the week, and I would also start work on any flowers or decorations that needed to be made ahead of time starting on Monday.
On Tuesday I would go shopping and buy the ingredients for the week’s cakes, which usually involved 10 dozen eggs, 20 pounds of butter, etc etc. Then I would prep the dry ingredients and label everything so that I knew which container went with which wet ingredients.
I would keep working on the decorations etc. for the cakes throughout the week, and I’d also get all of the cake boards for the week ready.
If the bride was going to be saving the top tier I would get the box for that ready, and I would also write up the information lists that I gave to the reception site with each cake.
I would bake on Thursday, and start decorating the cakes on Friday for Saturday weddings. If the weddings were on Friday or Sunday I would move those steps up or back a day so that I was always baking two days ahead of the reception.
And don’t get me started on the cleaning and dishwashing…There was so much cleaning and dishwashing. Terrible.
All of these steps take a lot longer than just making a single-tiered cake that has no need for structural supports, baking more than two layers, or decoratng more than one tier, so it will cost more.
Decoration and finishing touches.
Making the decorations for a wedding cake can take quite some time, depending on what you want.
If you’re looking for a cake that’s covered in handmade gumpaste flowers in custom sizes, varieties, and colors, that will cost a lot more than mass-market sugar flowers.
On the other hand, using fresh flowers sometimes doesn’t save much money compared to sugar flowers, so it’s always worth checking.
This cake was made using pre-made gumpaste flowers that I bought online instead of making them by hand.
Since the bride didn’t want any special kind of flowers, and she wanted to cut her costs while keeping the look, I suggested that she use gumpaste flowers that I bought on Amazon to keep the cost down.
Delivery logistics.
You’ll also want to make sure that the person who’s making your cake actually knows how to construct a tiered cake and how to transport it to where it will be set up. Plus the most important things, which is how to fix any problems that might come up during delivery.
I’ve had cakes slide and shift while I was delivering them, but because I was the one who made them I knew how to fix the probems.
I was delivering a wedding cake once and a delivery guy from a grocery store came in, dropped the box with the groom’s cake on it on the table, and walked out.
He didn’t even take the cake out of the box, so I went to do it, and the box had smashed every single piped buttercream rose flat.
Since I hadn’t made the cake I didn’t have any extra buttercream, but if I had made it I definitely would have had the ability to fix that (plus, I wouldn’t have smashed the roses to begin with.)
That’s the difference between paying for a custom cake and paying a grocery store to deliver a cake. Personal attention, plus the person who delivers the cake can fix any damage because they know what they’re doing.
There were many, many times that I had to carry a heavy wedding cake up and down stairs, through back alleys to the delivery entrance, and maneuver through busy kitchens, to get it where it needed to be set up. No delivery person would have taken as much care with the cake as I did.
This is part of the service that you pay for, so it’s included in the price of the wedding cake or as a separate delivery fee. And it’s well worth the price, since you don’t know how many stories I’ve heard of destroyed wedding cakes that the customer thought they could pick up to avoid the $40 fee.
Final thoughts.
To sum up, you’re not just paying for the cost of ingredients and the time it takes to bake a cake when you buy a wedding cake. You’re paying for a bunch of planning, design work, time to prep and bake, and for the most important part, the experience and skill of your baker.
Wedding cakes are expensive compared to a single-tiered birthday cake because they’re big, they serve a lot of people, they take a lot of planning and construction, and because they’re the centerpiece of your reception.
If you want to save money on your cake there are ways to do that, but remember that it’s not “just a cake!”
