People order by picture and then find out the cake feeds thirty when a hundred and twenty came. Portions are the only number that matters.
The most common ordering mistake has nothing to do with flavour or finish. It is buying a cake by how it looks and then discovering on the night that it feeds a third of the room.
Start with portions. A standard cake portion in this country is about an inch by two inches of a two layer cake, and that is more generous than a hotel portion and less generous than what an aunty will cut. The rough numbers: a seven inch round is ten to twelve portions, an eight inch is sixteen, a nine inch is twenty to twenty four, and a ten inch is thirty. Squares give you about a quarter more than the round of the same measurement because there are corners.
Tiers stack those numbers rather than multiplying them the way people expect. A three tier cake of six, eight and ten inches is not three times a ten inch cake, it is roughly sixty portions, which surprises people who were planning on a hundred and fifty guests. This is the single most common gap between what somebody ordered and what they needed.
For a big wedding the honest answer is a cutting cake and a kitchen cake. The cake on the table is the one that gets photographed and cut, and it holds perhaps sixty portions. Behind it, in the kitchen, are two or three plain sheet cakes in the same flavours that get cut and plated for the rest of the room. Nobody at a table of four hundred knows or cares which cake their slice came from, and the difference in price is large: a fourth tier is a thousand rufiyaa of work, and a sheet cake feeding fifty is 1,450 for the whole thing.
Second thing worth knowing: not everybody eats cake. At a wedding with dinner, plan for about seventy per cent of guests taking a slice. At an afternoon event with tea, plan for all of them and then some. At a school event, plan for one each and six spare, because somebody will drop one and somebody else will want two.
And last, think about who is cutting it. A tall filled cake in a crowded room with one knife and no table space is how a beautiful cake becomes a plate of rubble. If the serving is going to be rushed, order a single layer sheet cake and let the pretty one be small.
Tell us the guest count first and the picture second. We will work out whether the cake in the picture feeds your room, and if it does not, we will tell you what to put behind it.
