Wedding Planning – Cake (Simply Cakes by Sayu)

I love looking at pictures of beautiful cakes being cut at weddings. I think it’s adorable when they match the wedding decor. My cousin even had a custom cake top designed to match her and her husband’s outfit. You can get the most elegant looking cake knives with your names carved on them on Etsy. You can go above and beyond with your wedding cake. I just didn’t care.

Right off the bat, I knew I didn’t want to spend much on my wedding cake. I know it’s been trending with desis in North America, but cake cutting isn’t a part of the traditional Pakistani wedding, and I wasn’t really invested in having one. If I did, it would have just been there for the photos. For something I considered an accessory to the event, especially one that neither me nor my guests were going to be able to eat much of (given the fact that we’d have a dessert table there anyway), I really didn’t want to dish out another grand.

That automatically disqualified the big names, of course. I had contacted Fine Cakes by Zehra, Cake Delight by Farah & Bowtie Bakery for quotes for a party cake once, and for a guest count of 20 people I was looking at dishing out around $200. So for a guest count of 250 people at my wedding, I knew they were definitely out of my price range. I opted out of even contacting them.

I knew what kind of cake I was looking for, so I reached out to some other (newer? smaller?) companies and asked for very specific quotes: a 3 tiered cake feeding 175 people (70% of our 250 guest count) where the middle layer was vanilla and the top & bottom layers were chocolate. And I wanted it to look like this.

I got quotes from various different sources, and some were definitely reasonable given the quality of the work.

Sugar Bliss Cake Boutique – $400
Don’t Forget The Cake – $700
Dalia’s Cake Shop – $900
Vanilla Bean Cakery – $700
Simply Cakes by Sayu – $300 for my cake

I obviously went for the cheapest option, and honestly I only got to taste my cake once – during the cake cutting ceremony. Most of my guests opted for the dessert on my dessert table as it was placed conveniently beside the rest of the dinner buffet, and the cake was moved there by the servers a little too late in the evening. That’s one thing I would’ve changed had I anticipated in advance – I’d move up the timing of our cake cutting ceremony significantly so that the rest of the cake could be cut and placed beside our dessert table well before dinner got served.

When you are making your decision, there are certain other things you should be on the lookout for too.
– How far in advance will you need to place the order?
– Is cake tasting included in the price?
– What is the deposit structure?
– Do they include delivery and setup in their cost?
– How early can they be at the banquet hall to set up the cake?
– Do they provide cake tops?
– Some companies can provide a top layer that is real cake for the sake of your pictures, with lower layers being fake – they are just there for decor, and the ‘real’ bottom layers of the cake are sent to the kitchen to be cut and served. Is that something you want and they can provide?
– Will the hall provide the cake knife and server? Do they match your cake/decor or do you prefer something else?
– Will the banquet hall be cutting the cake slices and serving them? How does that align with the placement and timing of your other desserts?

I think that’s all the wisdom I can share in regards to cakes for now. Hopefully that was helpful. Happy planning, guys! 🙂