5 Tips To Cut The Cost Of Your Wedding Cake

A wedding cake should be a thing of beauty, a beautiful representation of the couple’s style and tastes as they celebrate before their friends and family.

As the wedding cake is one of the main centrepieces for your wedding reception, it’s tradition for it to be pride of place on display for all your guests to see.

There are so many options now available for wedding cakes – but as usual, as soon as the word ‘wedding’ is mentioned, the price skyrockets.

Here are a few tips and ideas on how to make your wedding cake more cost effective, without losing the specialness that it represents!

1. Use Faux Tiers

Dummy or faux tiers can replace real tiers. If you would like a really tall cake but do not have hundreds of guests or the money to pay for such a cake, fake tiers (usually made of styrofoam can be iced and used to increase the size and lower the cost. It is also usually less expensive to have an almost entirely fake cake, perhaps with one real tier to cut in front of the guests. One or more large cutting cakes which are not part of the display can be kept in the kitchen and handed out after the cake has been cut. Cutting cakes can even be made by family members or friends! No one needs to know!

2. Decorate Your Cake Using Fresh Flowers

By decorating your wedding cake with fresh flowers rather than sugar flowers, you could save a bundle! Making sugar flowers is very labour intensive and can significantly add to the cost of the cake. Make sure you check with your florist as to which ones are in season and would work well. Also, make sure the flowers are non-toxic and the stamen is removed so it doesn’t stain either the cake – or your dress!

3. Make Your Own Cake

Are you a demon in the kitchen? By baking your own cake, you can save a huge amount of money! This isn’t something for everyone, especially if baking and art is completely alien to you, but for many people, it is easily achievable with the right design and a bit of help. Even if you could make the cake yourself and have a cake decorator or even better an arty friend ice it for you can save a heap. There are many cake decorating courses around too – if it’s something that interests you, you could do your own and perhaps have a hobby on the side as well!

Cupcakes are another increasingly popular option. Cupcake towers are visually very impressive – and each guest has their own which makes it perfect for serving your cake as dessert! Cupcakes should ideally be made the day before the wedding for freshness (smaller cakes can go stale a lot faster than larger wedding cakes). See if you can get a group of friends together to give you a hand!

4. Why Fruit Cake?

Gone are the days that all wedding cakes have to be fruit cake. Now, you can pretty much have your choice of flavour – chocolate mud cake and white chocolate mud cake are very popular choices now – and again they make delicious desserts as well! Make your choice of cake depending on the cake design – a sponge cake may be delicious to eat – but if it is covered in tiers of heavy icing – it may sag! The larger the cake, the ‘denser’ the type of cake has to be to carry the weight. This is where the faux tiers idea may come into play!

5. Go to Your Favourite Bakery

Do you have a marvellous little bakery in town that sells delectable morsels? Why not see if they can make your cake? They will certainly be cheaper than a professional cake decorator – but don’t expect all the fancy trimmings. Great if you want a delicious yet simple wedding cake.

What are your hot tips to cut your cake costs?