Beware of Wedding “Budget” Tips
30 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: fake cake, wedding budget
Many wedding magazines today offer money saving advice for your wedding day. Sometimes I wonder if they don’t always do the math to see if the supposed “savings” really are. There are a lot of great tips out there and excellent DIY Ideas for those brides with more time than money, sometimes the money saved is negligible or non-existent. There are two wedding cake “Money Saving” tips that are tossed around that just don’t always add up to great savings.
Questionable budget tip #1: Use Kitchen Cakes
For those of you who don’t know what a kitchen cake is I’ll let you in on a secret…. It’s wedding cake! It will be made with the same cake, filling & icing as your cake and have the structure so when sliced to serve it look exactly like wedding cake. The only likely difference is that it is undecorated and most often in a sheet cake (rectangular) shape. Many wedding magazines and blogs suggest trimming your cake budget by using kitchen cakes along with your wedding cake to serve some of your guests.
So, you’re probably thinking right now… “This sounds awesome, sign me up!” Before you get too excited the savings are not nearly as spectacular as you might think.
The average wedding I do 125-150 guests and I find that most brides want at least a 3 tier cake with basic decorating so that their cake looks like a respectable wedding cake. We will use this common cake design shown below as an example.
Let’s do the Math on kitchen cakes
The cake pictured below to serve to serve 150 guests would cost you about $450.
Let’s say, you just want this cake to serve 100 and have your additional servings as “Kitchen Cakes”. The smaller 100 serving version of this cake would cost $310 and the kitchen cake to serve 50 would cost you $100. That would be a total of $410.
You get a smaller cake for pictures and only save $40… Hmmmm…. Some savings but, as exciting as you thought huh? The savings are even less if you have a completely unadorned cake design (commonly used with fresh flowers)
There are two scenarios where you CAN save good amount money using kitchen cakes:
#1 You have a large wedding with 200 or more guests…or
#2 Your wedding cake is extravagantly or elaborately decorated
Typically these are the only two scenarios when I recommend kitchen cakes
Questionable Budget Tip #2: Dummy Cakes
If you ask me about using dummy cakes you might see my ears get red, before I breath deeply and calmly explain why this will not likely save you any money and could possibly cost you MORE!
My first question to you is… Do you plan on serving cake to your guests? If so, then you don’t want a dummy cake.
What’s a dummy cake you ask? Dummy cakes are wedding cake minus the cake, the decorator still need to use the icings and decorating tools any other cake would require and take the time to decorate the “cake”- even if the inside is foam. A little wakeup call…. The biggest cost of wedding cakes is not attributed to the cake batter itself but the time, tools and talent it takes to decorate the cake. If this were not the case, anyone who could follow a recipe could do wedding cakes (and it only takes one look at Cake Wrecks to know this is a falsehood!)
Now for some really scary math, I’ll use the same $450 buttercream cake from before as an example
If I made this as a “Dummy Cake” I would charge you $330
Now you need cake to serve… Kitchen Cakes for 150 will cost you $310
Uh Oh… You just paid $640!!! That’s $190 MORE than just getting the regular wedding cake. And now you own a 4 tier display cake… congratulations… What exactly do you plan to do with that?
Ok, so I know I sound a little too snarky right now, but I can’t stand this little gem of advice that is floating around on nearly every budget cutting tip sheet.
Before I sound too negative about dummies, there two scenarios where dummies are a good idea.
#1 If you can find somewhere to rent a dummy cake for less than a third of the cost of a decorated wedding cake… or
#2 You want a MASSIVE cake that looks like it will serve 300, but only have half as many guests. In this case only a portion of the cake will be fake and will still cost more than an appropriately sized cake for your wedding.
There is no way to get that $1000 wedding cake for $500 but here are some REAL ways to keep your cake within your budget.
#1 Simplify the design… more elaborate design cost more… Period.
#2 When design allows, choose buttercream over fondant and save 20% on average
#3 Use Real or artificial flowers instead of edible gumpaste flowers.
#4 Avoid up-charges for gourmet flavors or fillings, watch for hidden charges too
#5 Downsize
