Why do custom cakes cost SO much?

See this beautiful but ‘simple’ little ruffle cake? It’s tiny, only 6 inches in diameter and about 12 servings.

FOUR HOURS. Four freaking hours to make those ruffles and edge them in gold. And I was busting my butt to get it done because I had an event to go deliver a cake to, so I wasn’t dawdling! And I didn’t get it finished. Had to finish the next morning.

Yes, ruffles are ‘simple’. But they are one of the most time-consuming & therefore ‘expensive’ cake techniques we do. A larger tier, say the bottom of a 4-tier cake, takes TWELVE or more hours for that one tier. The ruffled rosette tier on this cake took TWO of us more than a day to finish, working together, so about 18 labor hours total between the two. And the top tier was 10 labor hours.

And that’s not counting the time to mix from scratch, bake, torte, fill, crumb coat and final ice the cake underneath. That’s at least 1.5-2 hours per cake tier. And we haven’t even mentioned the cost of high-quality REAL ingredients, not chemical crap from a bag.

Skilled labor is valuable. Cake artists are highly skilled & spend years learning & enhancing their skills, always on the cutting edge of new trends & techniques. An electrician or a plumber charge at least $75/hr, right? What if THEY made cakes? This tiny little cake would be about $450.00, or $37.50/serving, again just for labor. We charge about $14-16/serving for ruffles, depending on exact style, including ingredients & everything. A bargain!

There is SO much more time involved than people realize, or than it looks like on the nowhere-near-reality TV cake shows that make it look like we wave a magic cake wand at our oven & a masterpiece just pops out in a few minutes. Complicated cakes can EASILY take 40 hours or more to complete, (we’ve had some take over 100 hours!) which is most people’s work WEEK.

I hope it makes more sense on why the cost is what it is now? They are WORTH every penny. 😘 😊 🎂