AIBU to expect the birthday cake booking date changed without extra charge?

[JavSurge]

We had to cancel DD's birthday party the day before due to her having S&D. We'd have gone through with it if it was a runny nose but not S&D, as much for our guests as well as her.

Anyway, most of the vendors (hall, entertainment etc) have honoured bookings in changing the date without charge given the circumstances.

As for the cake, she wants to charge us again. Now, for context, she had not finished the cake, had not started icing or decorating it. What's more, once I informed her the party couldn't go ahead, she said she'd pop the sponge in the freezer to be used for another time.

Now we have a new date arranged I have contacted her (2 days later) and asked if the sponge will last (Google says it will) until the party in a couple of weeks and if she's available to decorate it and deliver it on that date.

She's come back saying she didn't freeze it in the end and instead gave it to her neighbour, and now expects us to pay again for a new cake?!
If she'd iced it and it was ready to go then I would completely understand. However, given that it's just a change of date, am I being unreasonable to have expected her to just to use the sponge for us, or even used the sponge for another customer and then made it fresh. Either way to me seems reasonable as she'd not be using extra resources or time.
I can of course understand she might have got an extra customer (money) on the later date but it wouldn't have caused her extra costs.

Am I being being completely unreasonable?
If the cake was decorated I'd have never asked her to redo the whole thing for free but given that she said she was freezing the sponge surely it would be reasonable for her to do it free of charge (or a nominal fee if anything extra is needed)?

Importantly, it was the baker who said she would freeze the sponge, rather than something I asked for. I think if she's deciding what happens with the cake I paid full price for, then I would expect my cake for free or heavily discounted. The freezing to me meant she'd be saving herself some trouble and resources for another time. For example if she had to make a cake the next day she now wouldn't need to waste time or extra resources.

I'm only being rude back to those being rude to me.

I have asked of nothing from the suppliers, simply told them all to down tools so nobody's time was wasted.

The way I see it is you handed over £200 for her time, ingredients and delivery, but cancelled after your cake had successfully achieved "sponge stage".

Her accrued costs when you informed her last minute was the pre-booked time to make the finished cake, sponge ingredients and gas/elec.

As she hadn't used any filling or icing ingredients, you'd also paid an additional premium to costs of sponge + delivery. The sponge was in her possession, however, she already sold it to you for £200 incl. delivery.

You'd paid for the complete cake - therefore, the sponge was never hers to put in the freezer in the first place.

She's decided on some level, that "the cake is in my home, its mine for freezing and potential re-use in another order, or randomly gifting it to my neighbour" and not the business fact that its your £200, pre-paid customer order.

The "I've now given it to my neighbour", is at best, a moment of poor judgement and completely unprofessional.

The minimum discount off any further cake order is icing/filling and delivery

But as she's 'given the sponge to your neighbour", I'd be telling her to enter a marathon and jog on.

It does NOT matter. I don't know why you are fixated on that, because that's not the issue.

You book a slot, you pay for the slot.
When you cancel "last minute", it's too late to do anything with it, so you still pay.

It's none of your business if she had declined someone, if she didn't advertise availability, if she didn't comment on a local group "I am available" when someone asked for a last-minute booking
It was too last minute, you owe her the time

You are ready to pay a lot for an expensive cake, so you agree that her time is valuable!

Giving it to the neighbour is just bizarre and another problem😂

She was so blasé about giving it to the neighbour too. That's what has got me.
I had interpreted it that she was freezing it for it to be used for my party for a later date. I feel like as she kept the cake she sort of owes me a cake.

To counter this, you cancelled the order with a very short timeframe. Even though I wouldn’t expect you to have a contract or t&c for this kind of order, I think you could reasonably expect that you would not get your money back for a cancellation this close to the event.

I also wouldn’t expect the cake maker to be able to use your cake for another order. I would expect all the orders to be personalised on size, shape, and sponge/frosting flavour. Given that you had also requested an allergy specific cake, I would assume that it wouldn’t be suitable for another customer.

I cannot explain why she said she would freeze it even if that is what she was planning to do. I’m not sure why she said that to you and I agree it does imply that she might have been saving it for you for when your child was better.

I would still suggest that you should have taken the cake order as planned, even though you no longer needed the cake because then at least you had what you paid for. I think the analogy with a hairdresser stands here in that if you cancel with short notice, you can expect no haircut and no money back. Not helpful now, but maybe for the future, although hopefully it won’t happen again. As I said before, I still hope that she would offer you some discount given the confusion.

that's where it went wrong.

It was too late to cancel your order, and you owe her full price

BUT she should have told you: too late to cancel, I will deliver as planned. Or possibly, I deliver at a discount because it wasn't finished, but she would accept a loss of earning because she was set up to finish and counting on her order. So entirely up to her.

But taking your money (that you owe her in full) without providing the cake: wrong.

I would message about that, you understand what you owe her, but you didn't get anything?

I think you're entitled to a modest deduction to reflect the ingredients of the first cake. The frosting ingredients were not used and she chose to give away the sponge to someone for free (different if she'd offered it to you and you had said no). I don't think you can say you won't pay for her "saved time". She spent time on the sponge and had likely reserved time for the frosting, which she wasn't able to allocate to another customer at short notice, so it has cut into her income anyway.

Suggest you politely ask for a 25% reduction on that basis and see what she says. She may accept or negotiate but be warned, she may decline to make a second cake at all If she thinks you are being too cheeky.

I agree with this. I understand you pay partially for the time, but that’s only part of it. You are also paying for the materials to make the cake. Imagine you asked a builder to provide a fitted kitchen, but you cancelled the day before she came to fit it. Would you reasonably expect her to keep the kitchen you had ordered (or even give it away to a neighbour) Or, would you quite rightly say, give me the kitchen you’ve bought and I’ll have it fitted by someone else, or, I’ve already paid for the kitchen, what will it cost for fitting.

The woman is at it. If she had a contract and her terms were that a last minute cancellation was for the full price, English law would class that an unfair term. Under that counteract she could only insist on her actual losses being covered which is her time, and any mark up she puts on materials.

OP, she is, at the very least, owe you the undecorated sponge cake she gave to her neighbour.

I would agree except you cancelled the order. When you cancelled the order you terminated your request to receive the cake without any clarity on what would happen with your money. There are probably different moral and legal positions on what should happen with your money but the legal route is probably not worth pursuing and the moral route…well you can’t make her give you another cake unfortunately.

I have no idea. Neither do you. I cannot for the life of me understand how you don’t get it. You are paying for the ingredients, and her time slot between x and x on a set day. You took the time slot BECAUSE SHE COULDNT DO ANYTHING ELSE WITH IT by the time she found out it wasn’t needed.

you absolutely need to pay for the time slot at whatever her rate is. Just because you can’t grasp why for some reason, doesn’t absolve you of needing to pay.

yes, you should have had the sponge and been refunded the icing ingredient cost, unless they go off.

but you don’t know if she is charging you full price yet anyway, which you only disclosed after a few hundred responses, some of them in your favour, which was misleading if you.

How have you calculated 25%? She made the sponge and chose to give it away rather than storing it or giving it to the OP.

She’s being a cheeky fucker!
If she’s going to charge you twice, she should have given you the original cake at the very least.

I’d find someone else and tell her why.

If anything she owes you a basic sponge for the miscommunication but that would still be a good will gesture.

But a cancelled other in under 48 hours till the event is exactly that unless explicitly stated otherwise I’d say. Some places give goodwill others don’t because they cannot afford to.

I’m with you OP.

If all she’s done is bake a sponge, that’s about 5% of the time needed to make a decorated cake. Whether she freezes it, repurposes it or gives it away, the lost time and cost is small.

She has perhaps turned down other work that day thinking she’d be busy making your cake, perhaps she hasn’t. She’s got some unexpected free time on a Saturday, bliss on a baker’s busiest day.

You’ve already paid for the cake and she should surely have known you’d want the cake in the near future. if she’s too busy on the new date, she can refund. If she can do it, she can fulfil the original order.

If she wants to charge a few pounds extra for the lost sponge, I could see where she’s coming from if she hadn’t given it away.

What she is losing is goodwill from a customer who could potentially order cakes for years to come and give recommendations. To me, that is far more valuable than a bit of flour and sugar

You might have missed it because it was buried 20 posts in by the op, but the cake maker hasn’t actually confirmed that she will be charging full price twice. The op made out that in her op, to get people on her side, but it hasn’t actually been confirmed yet.

When she knew she couldn't freeze it I think she should have said that she would have to decorate & deliver as agreed.

I would have thought that the time for decorating is the most expensive part & that's what Op would be paying for again.

This is where you've gone wrong I think.

You've thought she was putting it in the freezer to save for you. She's thinking she'll put it in the freezer to save wasting it. Then she's given it to Doris next door instead, still not wasted.

She didn't say she was saving it for you, you've assumed that. She thought the cake order was cancelled, because you didn't tell her you'd want it at a later date.

And I absolutely support you in that, as I said. It's completely unreasonable on behalf of the baker to ask for further payments when you've had no benefit of the first payment you made. I think that it's possible that because neither of you mentioned rebooking or using the cake in your original messages you might have been talking at cross purposes and for her this is a whole new transaction but it's still a one sided deal with you at a loss.

What I'm saying to you is that she may challenge you, she herself may question you or be rude and how you react to it matters even if you are in the right. I have seen people challenge you and because their opinion or understanding of the situation is different, then your reaction is disproportionate and confrontational. You don't need to be defensive if you are in the right. You just answer honestly and ignore attempts to troll or bait you (if there are any which I haven't seen).

Useful advice is to go back to her and say that you are disappointed and confused that a cake you brought and paid for was given away without consultation after agreeing that it would be frozen for future use and, whilst you understand that some of the cost represents her time and skills, it seems unreasonable to be expected to pay in full again for a second cake when you have had no benefit from the first payment made, including a delivery charge when nothing was delivered.

It's a perfect storm of events

• unprofessional baker who is not clear about her canx policy and also her terms for resupplying a new cake
• a mother stressed by her daughter's illness and therefore didn't ask the terms for what would happen to her cake and money

If she's this blasé with a customer, I dread to think what shortcuts she's taking with the cake.

I've not seen any mention of them both living in the same village, nor have I see evidence of OP attacking other posters, they have pushed back, but attacking?

Your post opens with "I am actually on your side.. " but quickly slowly decays into introducing imaginary, vague opponents like "service providers" and then warn them about ending up on a Reddit in a Karen thread because they're AtTacKinG pEopLE.

That's certainly some change of pace from being on their side... one could be forgiven for mistakenly believing you were never "on their snide" in the first place

How are they going to end up on a Reddit thread anyway?

You can screenshot mine and add it on Reddit if you makes you feel better 😀

I just hazarded a very wild guess at the cost of ingredients (saved or given away). I'm not a baker so I have no real idea if 25% is at all accurate. I just guessed the bulk of the cost would be allocated to the time to be spent on decorating, rather than on the ingredients.

She chose to give the sponge away without asking OP. My point about that was that it wasn't hers to give. Though it's complicated that OP cancelled so I can see the baker thought "she doesn't even want this sponge and I haven't got room in my freezer after all".

If she was going to give away the cake that you have paid for, she should’ve given it to you.
if it had been finished, you would have gotten it.

I would find another cake maker, as she’s essentially charging you for 2 cakes and only giving you one

lol!!! unexpected free time on a Saturday, bliss how ridiculous can you get.

imagine you work for a company, in an office. One day you get to work and they say ‘there is an electrical shortage and we can’t work today.’ If you were still getting paid you might think ‘bliss unexpected free time off.’ But what about if they said ‘so we’re not paying you for today.’ ? So, not your fault, it was a working day that you thought you were going to make £100 for, but now you’re not. Of course you’re not thinking ‘bliss, an unexpected free time off’

All this

as you paid she should have given you the cake

neighbour did well with a £200 cake

fwiw I’ve frozen a birthday and wedding cake sliced and tasted fine when eaten later