Deciding on the size of a wedding cake can be an easy decision if you’re not worried about having too much or too little and you have a good budget. Generally, your cake maker should be able to advise you on the best size but here I have outlined several factors that could affect the size you need which, perhaps you may not have considered!
Most couples start their wedding cake journey by researching designs first, so size is not necessarily their first port of call, but regardless of whether you have chosen a specific design, it is always wise to bear in mind the size of that particular design may not meet your needs, and sizes or proportions may have to be adjusted to suit your wedding.
· Firstly consider the number of guests attending.
· Is the cake to be served as dessert? A dessert portion is larger than a standard finger portion.
· When will your cake be served? If it is late, is it likely that many guests would have already left or be far too merry to want cake!
· Do you want leftovers?
When it comes to having leftovers, we’ve had all types of client. We have once made a wedding cake twice the size that was needed as the bride had specifically requested to have lots of leftovers to take home and share with family afterwards. In contrast, another client wanted no leftovers at all as they were going away on their honeymoon immediately after the wedding reception and would rather have too little cake than have to deal with leftovers.
After you’ve addressed all these questions and have a rough idea of how much cake you’d need, is the size to your expectations? Is it smaller or larger than you expected?
If it’s bigger than you wanted, you can always just get the size of cake your design allows for and get the extra portions as a cutting cake (cutting cakes are not seen by guests and are only cut up and served from the kitchen, no one will ever know!).
If it’s smaller than you expected and want it larger for maximum impact, if your budget allows, just get a bigger cake! If you don’t want the surplus cake to deal with, another option is to add dummy tiers. These are made from polystyrene but can be decorated exactly the same as the rest of your cake so nobody would know that it wasn’t real.
Don’t be disappointed if you find that it doesn’t reduce the price of your cake by much (if at all) by replacing real cake with dummy tiers. The time it takes to decorate it will still be the same and that is essentially what you’re paying for when it comes to wedding cakes!
You can visit our website here for our basic portions guide of some popular wedding cake sizes.