How much is a wedding cake?

[TunaSalad]

Getting married next year and have started looking at wedding cakes.

We plucked a random figure out of the air of £400 for our provisional budget.

I have fallen in love with a cake maker and her prices start at £575.

I am trying to convince my DP that this is reasonable and actually our guesstimate was way under. He wants to keep looking and find something closer to budget.

So what do wedding cakes cost roughly in your area? This is 3 or 4 tiers.

We had an M&S cake which was 3 tiers - I think it was about £125 but that was 2 years ago and prices have inflated a lot, especially for butter which impacts cake costs a lot.
We then had ghe cost of the decorations on top and obv had to transport and assemble ourselves.
For a professional cake of a decent size with decorations and delivery / set up I think you should double your original budget.

Two tier but only one was real. Cup cakes to take home.

My son and DiL had one from M&S, gussied up by a friend. It was very good.

Our wedding cake was £575 17 years ago, 3 teirs of rich chocolate cake wrapping in white chocolate curls and dressed with mixed berries. Gave 150 portions and we served it with cream as desert at our reception. Expensive but tasty, plus the cake provider transported it to our venue and set it up.

Neither do Waitrose. Tesco used to do a plain royal icing cake as well at one point but they don't either.

The best you'll do from M&S is a Bride and Groom Colin & Connie and I think it's very hit and miss when they are in stock.

A word of warning. Wedding cakes in my experience almost ALWAYS go uneaten.
unless you serve it as a desert vast amounts of it are left because people just aren’t hungry for it by the time it’s been cut and served (usually around the first dance and served with the buffet).

ive never eaten any of my friends wedding cakes as I’ve either missed it or just been too full.
we had a small decorated fruit cake and small bites (like brownies) at ours and they weren’t eaten either.
the fruit cake was delicious but our guests were too full to try it. I’d have been gutted if we’d spent £100s on it.

so what I’m getting at is no matter how tempted. Do not spend a significant amount of money on one. IMO it’s a waste.

The opposite experience here. I’ve always eaten the cake and I’ve never been at a wedding with leftover cake; if anything there’s been a mad scramble to ensure every last bit of even the undecorated “cutting” cake gets distributed. Cake is the best part of weddings.

It really depends on your wedding priorities. Personally I couldn’t care less about chair sashes, matching groomsmen or bridesmaid outfits, posh invitations or music beyond an iPod playlist and speakers, or even a wear-once dress, but food and drink is worth paying for and makes the event imo, and that includes a cake that suits your tastes – aesthetic and flavour-wise.

Most of our wedding cake went. The rest was eaten the next day. DH was disappointed there was no fruit cake left when we got back from the honeymoon

There is a very popular place near me that does the best cakes ever. We’re getting married at quite short notice so I almost presumed they’d be full but turns out they’re not. We’re having 150 people but they said not everyone has a bit of cake so it’s three tier one (top tier is 6 inches, can’t remember the other sizes). It’s £350 which I thought was really reasonable! I know when you think about it it is literally three hundred pounds for some cake but when you add the word wedding to things everyone just gets carried away. My cousin paid a random woman £700 and it was absolutely rotten! Like stands out as the worst cake I’ve ever tasted and was so rock solid, even my partner commented on it and he doesn’t care about things like that

For a 3 tier we have been quoted from between £380 to £605. £380 was a lady who does cakes part time and advertises on Facebook, £605 from someone who gets featured in local area wedding brochures and photo shoots.

I am wincing at the "how much?!" attitude. I worked on a small wedding cake last week, it took a full working day just to make the sponges,.let alone clean up afterwards.

Price per head plus an allowance for choices and decoration is the way to go. I'd have to charge more than £2 a cupcake for ingredients now because I work with butter and other premium ingredients. You don't pay extra because it's a wedding, you pay extra because we use top quality everything to ensure it works on the day. Cheap paper cases or fondant will let you down.

Ours was around £300 eleven years ago. Three tiers, buttercream filling, fondant icing, very simple. It cost more than my dress but delicious, it was a simple wedding but I wanted a great cake. If your ehaving a decorated cake £575 seems quite reasonable.

Ours was £300 in 2020

Another one to say I've made a wedding cake and reckon it cost us over £100. When you take into account the rising costs of ingredients and the fact that fondant flowers take hours to make I think you'd struggle to make a cake for 60 yourself for less than £200 and a solid 6 weeks of every evening being dominated by making sugar flowers.

Sorry but unless money is no option and you can afford that then it's a ridiculous amount to spend. I had a m&s Chocokate cake plus a fruit cutting bar and it was probably £150 on 2008. I refused to pay out more than £200.

They are such a waste of money. It’s cake, not gold!!!!

we got a personalised giant Colin the caterpillar and 2 extra cakes made by a local baker for £30 each. Beautifully decorated with edible flowers and fruit flavoured icing. Delicious but not ‘wedding’.

as the baker was known for making cakes that actually taste amazing (sells at local fancy markets) we didn’t have the horrid dry wedding cake problem.

Placed them on two different heights of cake stand with Colin at the bottom to create ‘tiers’.

I bought my wedding cake from M&S. They had different sized square ones fruit cakes with royal icing on. I bought large and medium one. Neither I or my groom like rich fruit cake. I ordered a georgious sponge cake in shape of a castle. We both like sponge cake. My wedding cake cost about £70 my sponge cost £120. Once it is all put together on stand with fresh flowers and a few charms it looked fine.

Well DP has agreed we can meet with her, having seen what our original budget will buy us and the quality of her cakes he admits we probably under budgeted originally.

Her time and experience are definitely worth paying extra for her cakes are stunning.

We might have to have less flowers than some of her cakes so that the price doesn't spiral too much but something simple is fine with me.

Like the sounds of that caterpillar cake!!! Original, personal, lighthearted.

I on the chair sashes and loads of other gubbins. We didn’t bother with loads of that stuff and kept Centre pieces to simple candles.

our priorities were the food and drink, we made sure there were loads of both for our guests. Pretty much to our cakes detriment, people still tell us how fantastic our wedding breakfast was but it meant they were just too full to eat any cake or barely any of the evening food either.

hungry people will eat cake but regardless I wouldn’t spend 100s on a cake that once glance at is mainly ignored

£170 including decoration. Two tiers raspberry and white chocolate and elderflower and lemon, none wasted

Wedding cakes are as much or as little as you make them.

You can get white iced occasion cakes from most big supermarkets. Or you can spend thousands of pounds.

The question isn't how much they are, the question is how much do you want to spend.

I had 6 tiers (because it was the only thing I could do better than Lady Di!). My father's job was a confectioner and he royal iced wedding cakes for a living and my Mum so very creative and she had taken up sugar paste icing. They iced it together. It was beautiful and was even remembered in Mum's eulogy 30 years later, and friends said they were pleased it was mentioned.

I've no idea how much it would have cost as the decoration took absolutely hours and the royal icing lacework took up the whole dining room!

We paid £500 for our 3 tier cake 2 years ok. Bottom layer fruit and two different sponges to serve 80. The design was also very niche to our interests.
It was a lot of money to spend on a cake but everyone loved it.

We didn’t have a wedding cake, I’ve been to way too many weddings where it’s left uneaten at the end of the night & I had no interest in the ‘cutting the cake’ photo that everyone seems to have.

We put an extra £200 behind the bar, nobody ever noticed or cared we didn’t have a cake 😂