So, the cake! Exciting for me anyway so I'll share about that first: I was offered a number of jobs after the guests and staff sampled my cake. Many said it was the best cake they had ever tasted! I was told that I could probably do a couple just in the summer months and some brides don't have any affordable options. As much of an ego boost it was, I haven't met one person who has been successful baking cakes (Ie, making any kind of profit). Therefore I kindly accepted all the compliments and stated that I will make a heck of a lot more in my life working as an RN.
I realized afterward that the reason some brides don't know where to go when they are looking for wedding cakes is because they don't care much about the cake. If they did, they would be willing to pay for a baker's time along with real ingredients. As much as I will brag about people saying my cake was the best they had ever tasted, I swear there's no magic to baking cakes (just lots of butter!). Real ingredients cost a lot of money and I priced it out and it was just over $50.00 worth of butter which was almost 1/3 of the entire price of the cake. So, let's round out the price to $160.00 worth of ingredients (I didn't include tax with my calculation). That's $1.60 per serving for the 100 people the cakes were to serve. Most professionals charge $3.50 and up. A random online search shows that the average Canadian spends $524.00 on a wedding cake. Generally this means that a lot of people pay slightly less than this and a few spend a lot more for complicated, stunning cakes. I'm not terribly certain of how many hours go into making a wedding cake with proper ovens and what not, but they are generally made over the course of two or three days. I'm sure once you factor in how much running an oven, all the cake tools, if you have to hire someone, taxes you pay, etc. I am pretty sure the friends I have met who made cakes are all right when saying: there is no money in making cakes!
I'm not sure if any of you care about that kind of stuff, it was a bit of a rant. This was the first time I'd ever priced it out and thought people who are planning on poo-pooing the cost of their cake, know that you're probably not getting quality ingredients and your wedding cake may end up on cakewrecks.com!
Oh, so you might want to see my massive delicious cake, right? Ok, here you go:
A couple other things I learned:
- Hydrangeas wilt very fast! Note to self: use other flowers if at all possible.
- I should have cut the cardboard rounds before putting the cakes on them and decorating them (if you look closely, the cakes aren't perfectly centered)
- I need to learn how to make perfectly round dots (I had to use a toothpick to press the points down on each one - yes, seriously!)
- Finally, I would probably make the cakes at least 3'' bigger than the next tier. It looked like it was a little hard to cut a slice for the bride and groom during the cutting of the cake. Sorry guys!
Have any of you used pinterest.com? I LOVE it to have visuals of wedding colours and themes and just some fantastic ideas that float around on that site and the web.
Hope everyone is doing well and know that you can expect a few more blog posts now that I'm not insanely busy - just regular busy!
Until next time,
Karlily
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