Help! A bride just contacted me and said she had a limited budget but would like a beautiful dummy wedding cake and then have enough sheet cakes for the kitchen to serve 175 guests. How do I come up with a price? I know there is just as much work to decorate the dummy cake.

Yes..you are correct in saying that a dummy cake is just as much work than a real cake so I think you answered you own question.Charge it out the same as a regular cake you are doing...I can bet dollars to donuts the bride is expecting it to be way cheaper but once again mis-informed.You may price the kitchen cakes a bit lower since they don't have to be as extravagant as the cake itself but I wouldn't skimp on the cost of your labour etc for the dummy..She can take it or leave it!

Kiddiecakes is SO right. thanks to the bridal mags. that don't actually ask a baker about this stuff, there is a whole lot of miss informed brides about the "cheaper to dummy & kitchen cakes". NOT TRUE! Dummy cakes for me get a 20% discount off a regular priced wedding cake and sheet cakes have a base price of $3 per serving for buttercream, and $4 for fondant, they save on the decorations of a kitchen cake. When sliced, the kitchen cake will be 4" high and look like an actual piece of wedding cake. For example: your bride says BEAUTIFUL dummy cake, I hear seriously decorated dummy cake, so I'm gonna give it an $7 serving price for the dummy, and she wants a 4-tier dummy that if it was cake, it would serve 300 (guessing here), cause she wants a really grand, BEAUTIFUL dummy. So I get a total of $2100 minus the 20% cause it's a dummy = $1680, plus the cost of kitchen cakes for 175 people (and I'm not sure you will get an exact number in the sheet pans, so if you get a bigger number, they pay for that) and we'll say they are buttercream covered kitchen cakes = $525. So with the kitchen cake cost & the dummy cost she gets a grand total of $2205. Now if she just got the wedding cake for 175 at $7 per serving, she ends up spending $1225. You see how the whole dummy cake with kitchen cake thing is NOT cheaper and very misleading to brides? Now, she can go with a much simpler design and something smaller, but then she still might as well get an actual cake.

When you send her the quote, send her this link to my blog, where I spell it out for them.

http://cateritsimple.blogspot.com/search/label/fake%20cake

I would say that it CAN be true that it is less expensive to get a dummy plus sheet cakes.

For example, we do a lot of dummies for magazines. I would happily rent someone a dummy I have already made and then sell them party cakes for less than recreating a replica of the dummy. Onedummy, for example has about 11,000 swarovski crystals on it, and that alone is over $700 in materials cost, but I would rent her that dummy for $500, plus sell her sheetcakes at our standard pricing, and it would be less, but a custom dummy.... NO WAY!

Indydebi, you have that so nailed!!! I can't tell you how many people refuse to belive this. But it is so true. Those dummies cost a bit more than the ingredients, plus the shipping cost! But these shows and mags have them fooled into thinking that they wll save!! It is these same mags and sometimes shows that have people believing that "oh, sure to save yourself $$ on a cake, do it yourself!!!" Yeah right!!!! You so rock the cake boat, indy!!!!

I have an order for a cake that is made up of 4 dummies and 2 real cakes (they want grand, but not so much cake)....I quoted her $1.00 less per serving for the dummy cakes ONLY because she said she didn't care if it was real cake or not she wanted a 6 tier wedding cake and was prepared to pay for it too. I quoted her the reduced price because it allows ME to decorate the majority of her cake the week before the wedding vs. the night before! So I felt it lessened my work load enormously and that's why I offered the discount (and because it's literally JUST covered in fondant with ribbon around the border, no piping or anything)


Ok........................let me have it!!!!!!! I know I'm gonna get yelled at for it LOL