Fucking 70 quid for a cake????

[Hairwizard]

As title says. Quoted 'from' 70 quid for a Christening cake. This was based on a 6" square cake with 4 sponge layers. Not tiers. Buttercream icing. Any decs toppers etc would be extra and from 8 - 15 quid!
Am i missing something?? How the f does a cake cost that much?

My daughter is an artist and finds that people don't value her time or skill. They just want a bespoke, hand painted picture for the price they can buy a print at Wilkos...

We paid £75 for DS's we just had tea, cake and sandwiches at home with friends and family, so not an expensive party and wanted a nice cake for his first, I found some ideas on Instagram and our cakemaker did an amazing job, the decorations were all handmade and the cake was delicious to eat not just to look at. More than worth it for her time and skill.

I love how some people are saying “my bakery only charges £35”

Most, not all but most use packet mixes and in comparison to doing it from scratch it is a good deal cheaper, then very few I come across use actual butter in the buttercream, all the ones in my area of London use the trex mix which again is cheaper than butter. Nothing wrong with getting the cake from the bakery but a lot of it boils down to the quality of ingredients being used and it’s not always as simple as the bakery charges less so the lady on Facebook is a rip off.

For example for home cake or freebies for immediate family I will use cheapo Lidl couverture chocolate at 80 pence or so for 200g, but I wouldn’t dream of using that for a paying customer, the calebaut chocolate which is what I would use is something like £5 for 400g but you do actually notice the difference in quality, especially with the white chocolate

the lady who used to do my ds birthday cakes gave it up

well yes, she probably wasn't making enough for it to be worthwhile.

I make cakes as a hobby and they are always gifts as I can't be bothered getting into business with them because of the arguments over pricing. No one has any idea how much it costs, easily over twenty pounds and then add in my time. I think for a decent cake its well worth the price that can be charged. Ironically i joked about never getting a birthday cake last year and a relative who i had made lots of cakes for her family had a professional one made for me.

It's tricky - a bit like e.g. jewellery making, if people put a lot of hours into something then it has to cost an appropriate amount of money or they can't do it. Any skilled baker/cake decorator will of course need to charge that sort of price - but if you can't afford it then fair enough.

Many people can't afford the luxury of a bespoke cake and the alternative, as lots of PPs have said - is M&S! We could probably have afforded a more expensive cake for our wedding but things all add up so we chose to buy their celebration cakes, one bigger, one smaller, and borrowed a double tiered stand. We decorated them with ribbons and the sugar flower arrangements my SIL made for her DPs golden wedding - but you can buy some pretty ready made sugar flowers if you aren't lucky enough to have a clever SIL.

Horses for courses...….(but good cake makers do do some really amazing things to which I couldn't even begin to aspire......)

But @oxoxoxoxo no one is saying that we should all buy bespoke cakes, not all of us can afford them, me for a start! Supermarket cakes have their place, I'm lucky that I do seem to have a knack for it because if I didnt then it would be supermarket all the way.

The issue is people expecting a hand made cake, to their own design and specification, at a similar price to an Asda mass produced job.

Meh, you can always tell when it's a store bought cake. M&S isn't all that is it.

A bespoke cake with decent ingredients would be out of budget for me for anything other than a very special occasion but that doesn't mean I don't conceptually grasp or respectthat the cost (including labour) is about right - I do, and i know it's the same for anything hand made but it's still not affordable for a lot of people. I imagine the time taken designing, baking and bloody decorating the cake as well as liasing with customers about it, any petrol and ingredient costs, electricity, all that cleaning up. £75 sounds fine.

Your cakes are lovely @Clockworkprincess I could eat the giant cupcake bit on my own....

@Cakeasauraus (sorry I'm singling you out to make a point, but am truly not trying to get at you, you sound lovely) That cake is fabulous and you recognise the value of bespoke work- but objectively looking at it, it seems like it should still be more than £75. More like a £120 at least. It's 3 tiers to start. Maybe a professional baker on the thread can give their opinion and of course it depends on many things - ingredients etc - but is the person who baked it for you a proper business cake person or a talented hobbyist?

One lesson from this thread that applies equally to all women trying to run a bespoke/craft business is that our prices should be honest across the board to avoid people working for less than minimum wage and inflated or unrealistic expectations.

(Sorry again)

@CatherineOfAragonsPomegranate hi it's not it's only two layers, the volcano on top is rice crispies and the middle layer is a board that's iced that wasn't requested but the baker felt it looked better. Still a good deal but she is a professional and has a very very successful business locally and also does decorated sleepover party set ups etc so I trust she's knows her pricing!

Fair enough @Cakeasaurus clearly I jumped to conclusions about how many tiers there were

Glad she's successful. I apologise again if my post seemed to be implying anything negative.

@Cakeasauraus

That’s a blooming bargain at £75! It’s a lovely cake.

I Make cakes but even I’m thinking I should go to your lady to make my sons one next month, lol. I’m intrigued to know how she’s managed it for that price as the fondant alone would have cost me close to £15 ( but then I use Massa as it doesn’t rip/give elephant skin)

I made the attached a couple weeks ago it was a 4 & 6 “ and although it was technically a present to a cousin, She asked how much I would charge for it and I said £110 which she was shocked at because it looks like a simple cake, which it is but boy was it a fiddly bugger.. getting the little micro “beads” into position was soooo annoying and time consuming, I didn’t even get into it with her about the flowers and their cost.

@hoxtonbabe

Do you have to individually place the beads???

I imagined in my ignorance that you just sort of scatter them. Your cake is beautiful £110? Not sure it shouldn't be more tbh.

@CatherineOfAragons

On the top you do scatter the from a height so it has a chance of spreading out better, and the bigger ones were just a case of placing them where you want but the micro ones around the side we’re the tricky ones as the first hurdle is how do you get them to stick once you figure that out then it’s how do you not get them to not stick in clumps/too close and to have them gradually lessen and more spaced out as it gets to the bottom...that’s where tweezers and a tiny artists brush becomes your friend

Not the point here I know, but a 6" cake that has four layers sounds disproportionately high to me. I know people seem to like high cakes now though. I have seen these rainbow cakes with 7 layers but how do you eat something that big? I like cake as much as the next woman but do they have to be super-sized all the time?

Our daughters christening cake is costing us £75 but it is a 2 tier cake. So I’d expect about £40 for a single tier if simple like ours is.

That sounds labour intensive @hoxtonbabe you defo should charge more!! I know I aint got that kind of patience and attention to small finnicky details.

People still complaining about the cost of celebration cakes. I used to make them myself and no longer do, people just do not understand what goes into making a good cake.
Training courses
Quality ingredients
Quality equipment
Electricity
Gas
Time taken to make the actual cake
Time taken to decorate said cake
Not forgetting any decorations that have to be individually made, left to dry then painted and affixed to said cake
Cake drums/boards/dowelling/ribbon/boxes
Some cakes can take a full week to make.
I've even had to crack on with using saw, workbench, hammer, nails, screws etc to build intricate support for specially designed cakes.

Imagine all that for less than minimum wage, or even barely covering your costs.

When buying a bespoke cake there is a quote that rings very true:
Good cake isn't cheap, cheap cake isn't good.

If a person's budget is low, and I totally understand not wanting to pay more than £30 or less for a birthday cake, then they must go to Asda, M&S etc.

I have a friend who pays about £70-£90 for two cakes each year for her twins. They look amazing but taste bad, sickly sweet and a lot is left over and binned afterwards.

The cake maker I used for the last couple of years for 8" birthday cakes with themes which involved 3D icing animals and scenery cost £50/£55. They looked and tasted amazing, highly professional standards and used free from ingredients, which often cost more in supermarkets. This is not a cheap end of the country, so very reasonable judging by this thread.

zombie thread

@Chillicheese123

Just get a Costco cake done. Everyone will love it

Nope, hardly anybody loves a Costco cake. When DS was little he was invited to a birthday party where a Costco cake was served, it looked great but even the kids left a lot of it on their plate.

Make it yourself then... no? Want professional work? Then you have to pay for it. It's a business, not a charity!

Just because you cannot afford, it doesn't mean the price is wrong..

Looked at starting my own cake making business but looking at pricing put me off. On top of the ingredients, cake board, box, electricity etc you have to factor in your own time at around £15 per hour to make it worthwhile. Things like colouring and perfecting icing cakes and boards take a lot longer than you think and hand making decorations takes a really long time and prepping in advance. You may also need to go to the shops especially for the ingredients. If you want something plain and uncustomised you are much better off with a bakery or M&S.