I just got an order for a car cake and was wondering if any one had a method to figure out how many servings are in a 3D cake. I don't have a picture for my cake, but was wondering in general if there was a universal way to determine this for all 3D cakes. TIA

I don't know how others do it, but I do it mathmatically (at least to figure servings for charging, cutting is another animal depending on the shape)

I use 8 cubic inches for one serving. So I figure up the total cubic inches of the final cake and divide by 8 for the total servings.

Not sure if this helps you or not.

If you provide a little more information maybe we can help you figure it out for this cake.
1) How many servings are you looking for?
2) What kind of car is it? (might depend on how to stack cakes and what size to use)

That helps a lot actually. Thanks. The cake should be about 25 servings... it's a 65 Mustang

Sometimes I do the same thing as mentioned above by calculating the number of cubic inches, then dividing. For a quicky way, I say 1 box cake mix is 10 sevings, so 5 boxes = 50 generous servings. If I trim a little, estimate -1 mix or alot -2 or -3 to get an approximate number of servings. Typically I make my carved cakes a little larger than needed to ensure the number of servings. This cost is often taken care of in the Design Fee.

I tend to charge my sculpted cake by the job, not the servings, some of my cakes cannot be recreated for less that 25-30 people, so sometimes they have to pay more because the cakes are not able to be sized down and too, it's easier to work larger for me and it takes nearly the same amout of time to do a 57' Chevy or my fishbucket for 25-30 as it would 75.

Check out pics for the car, it will serve 50-60 wedding sized portions, and it took 12-14 hours to make, the fish bucket will serve 40 or so and took maybe 6 hours or so.

GOOD LUCK!!!

dianaguerrant the chevy is awesome! So if it serves 50, what size pans did you start with? My thought was to use 2 12x8s stacked (it's a convertible also) but I'm worried it will be way too much. I'd rather have too many servings then not enough