Tuesday 20 May 2014

DIY Wedding Cakes

In our first instalment we take a look at DIY Wedding Cakes - giving you a number of ideas, tips and tricks to start designing and creating your own wedding cake.

With the average 3 tier wedding cake costing around £400 this already takes up a large proportion of your wedding budget. A cake is standard at a wedding - you cannot just take it out of the wedding altogether - but there are a few different ways that you can save some of your budget:

Compromise on Flavourings
Fruit cake is more expensive than sponge - that is a fact. A quick way to take some money of the cost of the cake is to change the filling - most places will allow you to have a top tier as a fruit cake and the second and third tiers as sponge. This gives a great variety for your guests and helps you to save some of the cost.

 Wedding Cake as Dessert
Instead of having a dessert at your wedding breakfast serve your cake! This will help greatly with the cost of catering at your venue and with all the goings on of the day your guests are sure not to notice too much! The only issue with this is that your chosen venue may require you to have a dessert from them to make minimum spends. However if you can get away with this then this can cut your budget and can even be combined with the below suggestions to cut the costs even more.

Buy the Cakes, Make the Decorations
There are a number of places nowadays that allow you to just buy the fruit or sponge cakes - allowing you to take these home and decorate how you want. This will certainly lower the cost of your cake - however it may still cost more than you think to buy the cakes and decorations.

Design the Wedding Cake Yourself
Designing and making your own wedding cake is the most cost effective way for the creation of your wedding cake - allowing you to get the exact cake you want at the right price. There are a few drawbacks with creating your own cake - we give you a quick guide below to creating your perfect wedding cake:

Practice Makes Perfect - Make sure you practice your dream cake a couple of times before the big day - allowing you to get the flavourings and decorations perfect.

Find your Strengths - You may not be brilliant at every aspect of creating your cake - you may be better at the creation of the filling than the decorating. If you find this when practising recruit some friends to help out - they are sure to have different skills to you that can help.

Plan & Start Early - When it comes to creating the actual wedding cake make sure you have a plan of action ready. You need to create time scales to make sure that all aspects of the cake will be ready in plenty of time.

Pick the right Tools - Make sure you find the right tools for the job - somewhere like www.weddingacrylics.co.uk has a wide array of wedding specific wedding cake creation tools - from a cake stand to cake decorations.

Do you have any more tips for a cost effective wedding cake?