How to Choose a Wedding Cake
Choosing a wedding cake can be overwhelming when you first start to look at all of the various options available to you, but when you really break it down, it’s not so complicated at all. All it really comes down to is finding the crossroads of what you want, what’s in your budget and what a cake designer can do for you.
Developing Your Cake Ideas
When you first start out, your head will be swimming with ideas. Making a great cake isn’t so much about coming up with ideas, that’s the easy part. Making a cake is really about narrowing those ideas down to one or two really great ideas, and finally settling on one that you can be truly happy with.
So what makes for a great cake idea? Well it really comes down to a few basic factors. First of all, if your wedding has a theme already, then you should probably stick to it. If you’re having a traditional themed wedding with a novelty themed cake, it’s going to seem out of place on the big day.
Just try to stick within a theme. The cake should match the event. That said, if you haven’t made any decisions yet on the theme of the wedding, you can always start with the cake, and then design the rest of the wedding around the theme you selected for the cake itself.
Building a Low Budget Cake
A great cake doesn’t have to cost a fortune. If you have a small budget, just find a few bakeries in your area who handle wedding cakes, present them with some ideas and ask what they can offer you on the budget you’re providing them with.
You should be willing to shop around and see what various bakeries can offer you. You may wind up being pleasantly surprised at just what’s possible on a limited budget.
If you don’t have a lot of money to spend, then you should have a plan in mind for the theme, you should know where you’re drawing the line, what you absolutely have to have on the cake, but you should be open to suggestion for a lot of aspects of the design. If you have a limited budget, you might not be able to get the five tiers you wanted, for instance. Just keep an open mind and you may be pleasantly surprised.
Building a Big Budget Cake
When building a big budget cake, the sky’s the limit. If you have a successful career or a rich uncle footing the bill, then there’s no reason not to be very specific with what you want.
These days, we’re all familiar with those celebrity cake designers like Duff Goldman, and the great thing about having the money to hire anyone you want to design your cake is, well, you can actually afford those celebrity cake designers. If this is you, these people make a living on crafting those wild cakes that most bakeries never thought possible, so let your imagination run wild.
Mid-Range Cakes
Of course, chances are that most of us will be somewhere in the middle: we may not be able to hire Duff Goldman, but we have a little bit of money to spend and want to get the very best cake for our buck.
In this case, the most important thing is to keep a close relationship with your cake designer. The more back and forth between the two of you, the more satisfied you’ll eventually be with the cake. If they have a problem and your initial idea turns out to be impossible, you want to be there to suggest alternatives. Being there every step of the way will help to ensure that you get the cake you want at a fair price, so if you take one thing from this article, let it be this: be good to your cake designer, and they’ll be good to you.
photo credit:Photospin