Cake Options :: Have your cake and eat it too

Palermo Bakery www.palermobakery.com

...The Bride Cuts the Cake!

When considering your centerpieces for display at your reception, here’s something I’d like you to remember: The cake is in fact a centerpiece. It’s the mother of all centerpieces. It sits on its own table; sometimes, even the groom’s cake will not share the table with the wedding cake.  Your wedding cake is typically displayed as the focal point when entering the reception area.  Naturally, you’d want to ‘WOW’ your guest with this fabulous display of deliciousness…but at what cost?

 Give me Tiers! Not Tears!

An average guest list will be around 125-150 and the average budget is from $25k-$30k. (The Knot Inc., 2010) I allocate 2% of the budget to the wedding cake (or 5% of the total reception budget). So a wedding cake budget can range from $500-$600. Not nearly enough to get that multi-tier cake you dreamed about (bring on the tears) since the per person slice can start as low as $6. However, I have news – great news! You have options and I’ll present two of them to give you some hope…so let’s bring on the tiers!

Embellish, Illuminate, Exaggerate

One way to go is to order a simple two or three tiered cake and keep it simple. The embellishment is not in the cake and how much you can throw on there to make it pop, the embellishment is on your display table. Mount the cake on a stand in the center of the table and surround it with decorations. Don’t take away from the cake, but trick the eye to make the cake appear bigger; maybe a bit of lighting around the cake to give it more height or a few floral arrangements strategically placed to make the cake look bigger. Don’t worry if the cake only feeds up to 100 guests, order a sheet cake with the same flavors. After the cake cutting ceremony, the display cake will be taken away and your catering staff will have the sheet cake in the back, cut up, and ready to serve.

Here is another clever way to have that huge platinum style wedding cake on a not quite so bronze budget. If you want the wow factor a multi-tiered cake can exude from your guests, consider having a few tiers made of Styrofoam covered in icing or fondant. You can then have it detailed and designed in the way that suits your platinum style taste buds. Again, the catering staff will be there to cut and distribute the cake to your guests. No one will know the wiser except for you, the catering staff, and your baker.  And your pictures will look absolutely Tier-rific!