But It’s JUST Cake!?!

Below you will find 3 different articles on just why you pay what you do for a Wedding Cake. I thank these ladies for allowing me the opportunity to use their words to say just what I have been trying to put into words myself. Thank you, Ladies!

Here are the views of 3 people, the first a former Cake Decorator, the second a Wedding Coordinator and the third, a journalist for the newspaper “The New Mexican”.

This was originally published in the Tennessee Wedding & Events Specialists Association Newsletter.It is reprinted here with Christine’s permission.

Why Is This Stuff So Expensive?

by: Christine Boulton

 It’s just a cake, how could it possibly be worth $1000.!!! You can bake a cake at home for a few dollars. What’s the difference? Scale and degree of difficulty are part of it. Work on a well crafted wedding cake can begin weeks in advance. If you are using sugar paste flowers, they are intricately hand crafted, one petal at a time. A highly skilled sugar artist will take great pains to mix colors to reflect the true beauty of nature. Ingredients are scaled and mixed, lots and lots of ingredients. Pounds of sugar, pounds of soft wheat cake flour, many pounds of butter and dozens of fresh eggs. Care must be taken to insure the structural integrity of each layer that it may support not only its own weight, but also the weight of the tiers above it. Special formulas are necessary for the chemistry to work on larger layers. A knowledge of food safety is required. Remember if fresh eggs and dairy products are handled improperly, you run a risk of food poisoning. This requires your baker to have invested in a large amount of refrigeration. At home, you bake and frost one cake. For a wedding cake many tiers must be iced with precision, with special pains taken to insure that each is finished in harmony with the others. Every scallop must be identical, swags must be precisely measured to insure proper placement. All icings must be flawlessly smooth. Your baker also has a basic understanding of structural engineering. 4’ tall wedding cakes that feed 300 people are not magically held aloft be good intentions. They are built using the same principals as skyscrapers. In building, it is called bearing pile construction. In a cake, it is represented by the wood or plastic stakes in your cake. Your baker knows where to place these “bearing piles” and how many are needed to evenly distribute the weight above. At home, you place your cake on a pretty platter, but what would you do with an 18” cake. Custom cake boards must be either acquired or created. Getting your cake to the reception site is also a process. It must be timed so that it is set up in advance of your guests’ arrival, but not so far in advance that it sits out too long. The delivery person must be equipped to repair any possible mishap that might occur in transit. Once on site, the professional will check the table for stability and level, and be prepared to fix any problem with the table. A true professional has great confidence in their skills, but also remembers that while it may be one of many cakes to them it is an incredibly special, once in a lifetime cake for the bride.

But its just sugar, flour, and butter

This has been reprinted with Nicole Mulvany’s permission. Nicole is a Wedding Coordinator in the Boulder, Colorado area. You can see it in it’s original form here http://www.livejournal.com/users/rsvpshindig/ and you can visit her site here www.rsvpshindig.com

9/8/05 12:58 pm - Let them Eat Cake!

"How much is it per slice?  But its just sugar, flour, and butter!"

As my summer weddings come to an end it is time for me to make a comment on cakes, brides, grooms, bakers, and why cakes cost what they do.

I will be the first to rant each time a new bridal magazine comes out with an idea of how to cut costs and they suggest to serve cupcakes in place of a wedding cake.  Or to use a fake cake in place of a real cake with only one tier that is real for the bride and groom to sllice.  Or the absolute kiss of death for a coordinator who is suppose to be saving her clients money is to actually see a wedding cake priced in the magazine!

First of all wedding cakes in magazines are NEVER and I mean NEVER the actual size they appear in the magazine.  They are smaller.  They also have at times been made out of something other than buttercream or fondant. 

Cupcakes cost just as much as a wedding cake does if a decoration is to be used.  Unless of course someone is going to make those at home themselves and decorate them.  At that point brides have to weigh out how much the stress is worth as well as their time. 

Cake bakers have invested in equipment.  From their mixers that they sometimes are still paying for to the pans, spatulas, iciing bags and little dowls used between the layers.

Whenever I hear someone comment on the price of cake I always ask them when was the last time they baked.  Then I ask when was the last time they baked a cake at 5280 altitude with enough layers to make a cake that will feed 150 people.  On a good day at Safeway you couldn't buy enough boxes of cake mix for less than $50 to make a cake for 100 people.  Then add in a few dozen containers of iciing.  Stack it.  Move it.  Decorate it.  Now tell me if you think the cake that was only $350 from the local bakery was worth it.  Tell me the difference in the looks.

Here is my Wedding Cake 101

What determines the cost of wedding cakes?

There are numerous factors that contribute to the cost of a cake. Number one is the geographic region where the wedding will take place. Other factors are decorator experience, cake quality, creativity, artistic ability, fillings, delivery, type of flowers and other decorations.

There was a survey which interviewed cake artists across the United States that revealed the basic price for a simple buttercream cake could be as little as $1.50 per serving in rural areas to $12.00 per serving in a metropolitan area, such as New York. The decorators interviewed were considered cake artists rather than cake bakers and have small studios or licensed home based businesses rather than commercial bakeries.

In Colorado prices seem to range on the lower scale with cakes starting at $1.75 - $2.00 but ranging as high as $6.00 - $7.00.

Experience of the cake artist should always be a factor in price. Someone who has been decorating twenty years will be more competent in some situations than a beginner who has had little or no training. Taste the cake for quality. Although you have a beautiful cake, you do not want a course texture like corn bread for your special occasion. It should be delicate, light and tasty. Do you want a filling in your cake? The price of fillings also varies.  Each cake baker will have a different version of a raspberry filling.  Some may use frozen raspberries while others use a mixture of fresh with liquor mixed in.  Bottom line brides have to remember that cake bakers that make delicous cakes use delicious ingredients that are high quality and do not come cheap to them. 

Talk with decorators and look at pictures. Do you have a picture you want copied or an idea that you would like to see sketched out? It takes more skill to design a cake specifically for you than to copy something from a common book. Most decorators do not charge extra to copy a picture that you bring in unless it involves very difficult decorations.  There is one cake baker in Denver that still does a hand sketch for her brides.  This is rare because most cake bakers in our area no longer do this.  I tell everyone of my clients that has booked her to be very thankful that they have that sketch.  Her drawings are so extraordinary I would frame it and hang it if it was me.  To me she has made it possible to still enjoy something that is normally one of the things that is gone after the wedding.  That cake has long been eaten, but brides and grooms will have a picture that in many ways is more precious than the photo their photographers took.

The type flowers used on the cake can make a significant difference both in the appearance as well as the cost. Of course the first thing many brides will say is that they will supply their own flowers once again lessening the cost with their baker.  But, in the end unless they are buying wholesale they are not getting them that much cheaper.  Plus, brides need to take into account that they will have to supply the flowers to the florist the day of the wedding thus adding stress to their wedding day.  It is one more to add to their to-do list.  Normally there is no additional cost for tube decoration buttercream flowers. However, hand molded sugar paste flowers can cost approximately the same as fresh flowers with some variance. A top piece could cost as little as $50.00 ranging upward to $200 for a full cascade. A decorator can charge $5.00 per rose and $3.00 per cala lilies. One decorator charges $35 per hour for the time required to form the delicate petals. Most decorators seem to lump off an amount according to complexity rather than charge by the individual blossom.

The fake cake.  Many brides want the appearance of a large display but do not want a lot of cake left over. Some brides often request styrofoam or dummy cakes. Normally they think this will be less money, but this is not necessarily true. Some decorators do not decorate fake cakes at all. Others charge the same as for fresh cake. Styrofoam is as expensive as ingredients and the same amount of decoration is required. Some places offer rental cakes for the bride who wishes to cut corners. She places the rental cake on display and serves less expensive sheet cakes.  As my own cake baker told me when I was getting married that it cost just as much to make fake icing as it did to make the real deal. 

Delivery must also be a consideration. Some areas price their cake to include local delivery. Does the baker have to only drive across town in Denver?  Or are they going to haul a cake up the hill to Vail?  Is it the heat of the summer and there is a chance they could get stuck in traffic on I-25?  Is it one tier, two tier, three or more?  How much time is it going to take to move the cake from their van to the reception table?  In Colorado the going rate for delivery seems to be $50.  I would not be surprised to see that go up in the months ahead with the current gas prices either.

We have many talented cake artists in our area that can provide New York and Beverly Hills quality for affordable prices. All you have to do is search for them.  Each bride and groom have different ideas as well as various budgets. The selection is similar to buying a car.  Will you choose a budget car or a luxury model?

Pricing will always be a challenge on the part of a cake baker.  Because art is always going to be priceless. 

Wedding cakes: costly tiers and, maybe, tears

http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/29324.html

By PAT REED | The New Mexican
June 22, 2005

I took three baking classes last spring at Santa Fe Community College, but when the fourth one came around, I backed out. It was cake decorating. And my few attempts with a pastry bag up to that point had been a disaster. Besides, I told anyone who asked about my pastry classes that I was skipping cake decorating because I had no intention of ever making a wedding cake.

A few weeks later, of course, The New Mexican’s food editor asked me to bake a wedding cake. She had received a new book, Dede Wilson’s Wedding Cakes You can Make: Designing, Baking, and Decorating the Perfect Wedding Cake, to guide the process. She also said the newspaper would buy whatever I needed to make the cake.

The food editor didn’t quite put it this way, but the implication was clear: If I could make a wedding cake, almost anybody could. There may have been some truth in this.

I was to make the cake and decorate it, and a photographer would shoot what I had created. My story and that photograph would run in the newspaper along with the picture of the cake I had selected to copy. The reader could then compare my effort with Wilson’s .

I thumbed through the book and found a good-looking cake I thought I probably could make. I would have to be able to pipe “an overlapping leaf border” at the bottom of each of the cake’s tiers. But that border looked relatively simple. Even I might be able to master it.

The rest of the cake would be decorated with roses and tulips — in apricot, orange and russet — some candied orange peel cascading down the cake and a handful of candied orange slices.

The cake recipe — a yellow cake with orange zest — didn’t excite me, but I quickly found one I liked. Called a Marzipan Orange Cake, it was a yellow cake made with almond paste and orange zest, and it was moistened with a syrup containing a dessert wine from California called Essensia, an orange Muscat.

Wilson recommends baking a small, trial-run version before undertaking the bigger project. That is especially helpful advice at high altitude , where you never know how a cake will turn out.

To accommodate Santa Fe’s altitude, I simply switched the cake flour to all-purpose , and the cake turned out well.

I had some trouble with the moisturizing syrup, however. My first 8-inch cake wasn’t moistened — it was drenched. My second one was also drenched, just less so. And Wilson notes in her book that other bakers have told her they, too, have trouble determining how much syrup is enough.

However, once the cake was appropriately moisturized , it was delicious.

Now I needed to find two 6-inch , two 10-inch and two 14-inch cake pans, preferably made by Magic Lite, Wilson’s recommended cake-tin maker. After a little searching, I ordered the pans on the Internet from an outfit called Cake Art. Price: $59.94.

This cake, I realized, was going to be expensive. It was obviously time to make a list of everything I was going to need to make the cake and figure out where I could find it and how much it would cost.

So I read Wilson’s book, jotting down everything she recommended the wedding-cake baker have at hand. My list took up two sides of a regular-size sheet of paper.

Armed with that list, I checked back with the food editor, who became alarmed as she read over what I needed. “I don’t think the newspaper can afford this cake,” she said, or words to that effect.

The food editor shares her cubbyhole with several other reporters. “Do you think it’s cheaper to make your own cake?” one of them asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I suspect it depends on how many friends and relatives you plan to make cakes for. If only one, maybe not. The equipment you have to buy may be too expensive. But if you’re going to eventually make more than one, maybe.”

The food editor brightened up. “Find out the answer,” she said. “Do a story comparing the cost of making your own wedding cake and buying one.”

Ultimately, I concluded that baking a wedding cake myself would cost around $228 for the ingredients if I bought mostly organic products. It would cost somewhat less if I didn’t buy organic. Roses and tulips decorate Wilson’s original cake, but by June, tulips are out of season, so I decided to have only roses and lemon leaves. Margaret Bost Floral quoted the best price, $45 for 30 roses and $4.50 for lemon leaves. But the flowers could cost more than $120, depending on the florist chosen.

Most home bakers will have some of the equipment Wilson recommends or will choose to do without a few pieces. You can obviously make a cake without everything Wilson lists. Certainly, based on what I already had, I could knock more than $300 off the cost of producing the cake. But if a baker had none of the recommended equipment, the price of acquiring it would total around $650. That makes the ingredients and equipment come to just over $900.

So how much would it cost to buy a cake from one of Santa Fe’s well-known wedding-cake bakers?

Chocolate Maven would recreate my cake for around $475 plus flowers. Wedding-cake bakers tend to use the same florist the bride has selected.

Depending on the bride’s florist choice, roses can run as high as $4 each in Santa Fe. But the florist bills the bride, not the cake maker.

Donna Brand, who owns Desserts for All Occasions, makes a cake similar to the one I had selected. Called an Orange Blossom Cake, it’s made of an almond genoise, orange frangipane and cognac, and frosted with a buttercream icing. Price to serve 100: $550 plus flowers.

Maggie Faralla, who owns Maggie’s Cakes, would create my cake for 100 people for around $650, plus flowers. And La Posada de Santa Fe Resort & Spa would make the cake for 100 guests for around $1,000.

But Wilson had another cost for me. “You need a reliable car with a large flat space to accommodate the cake,” she writes. I don’t have such a vehicle. And, she warned, I should make a sign for the car’s window that reads: “CAUTION: WEDDING CAKE ON BOARD.”

To move my cake, I’d need to rent a minivan. Price: $65.Of course, most of Santa Fe’s wedding-cake bakers also charge for delivering the cake, usually $50.

My conclusion?

Except for La Posada, it would be cheaper to select someone else to make a wedding cake than to bake it yourself.