"Rent the cake, save the money."
The response is uniformly "Rent the cake? How could I do that?"
"Because they're 100% artificial."
"These are fake? Get out! Can I touch one?"
And that's when they're standing a foot away from them. Even bakers conclude that our cakes are Styrofoam covered with fondant, and confide that they dislike working with foam because it is light and shifts away from them. They ask how long our fake cakes will last and are perplexed when I say there is no expiration date.
This is a typical edible cake meant to serve 100 guests:
Photo courtesy Stockxchng.com
Minimally decorated with buttercream frosting such a cake will cost - depending on your area of the country - from $300 to $500. In all likelihood it will be delicious, because bakers are folks obsessed with taste, and thank god for that. Who doesn't love great cake? But they aren't always sculptors.
Why not rent the cake below instead for just $270 and serve sheet cake (price varies; typically it is less than $1/serv.)?
With traditional, edible cake your wedding budget will be a thing of the past the minute you say you want a wild, outrageous, stunningly beautiful behemoth of a cake like ones regularly shown in magazines and on television. Those cakes can cost thousands of dollars, and they are often more about design than taste. Fondant looks amazing but many people think the taste of it is, shall we say, less than stellar? Why pay several dollars a serving for something your guests are going to peel off and leave on the plate? (That's if it even makes it to the table; knowing that most people dislike its taste, many servers will peel off the fondant and serve only the cake underneath.) A much smarter route to go is to order a custom faux cake and serve delicious kitchen cakes made by your favorite local bakery, or ours. Holiday Rental Cakes recently teamed with local culinary professional Terri Fugmann to provide edible portions of cake for your event. Let Terri or whoever you choose run wild with flavor and fillings without having to worry about architecture. Or have them craft individual desserts instead of slice-and-serve. You could also purchase your edible cake from someplace like Wal-mart, which sells sheet cake for just 33 cents per serving.
Finally, you really can have the look you want and eat (and afford) it too!
Go Faux It
*Faux = fake, and a fake is "a work of art that is deliberately made or altered to appear better, older or other than what it is." A faux wedding cake is one which looks good enough to eat but in actuality is Styrofoam covered with inedible frosting.
Fact: Many celebrity wedding cakes are faux, as was everything on the dessert table at the celebration of the 90th Anniversary of British Vogue magazine. Martha Stewart has a room in her warehouse filled with faux cakes and pies (used in the photo spreads in her magazine), and Walt Disney World and many other hotels these days offer a limited selection of faux cakes as part of their wedding package. Couples pick a display cake, have their picture taken with it, and their guests are served either sheet cake or individual desserts. (Nationwide, sheet cake runs about $1.50 a slice, compared to the $3 to $14 per slice that a traditional cake costs, depending on the intricacy of its decoration and the notoriety of its baker.)
So, if some hotels offer faux cakes as part of their reception package and bakeries often make dummy layers, what does Holiday Rental Cakes offer that they don't?
1.) Selection. If they even have faux cakes, a hotel will have just a few basic designs from which to choose. Hoilday Rental Cakes offers a wide variety of pre-made cakes. We also do custom work, so if you don't see something you like, email us. For a nominal fee, we'll work with you to create the perfect faux cake for your special occasion.
2.) Price. The cheapest part of an edible cake is the cake itself. The expense is in the decorating, which means that bakeries can't save you any money by decorating Styrofoam. The only reason before now that people have asked them to do it is because they wanted a showpiece cake to photograph but not to eat. Ordering both a Styrofoam-filled cake and sheet cakes from a bakery, though, means additional cost, not savings. Rent your centerpiece cake from Holiday Rental Cakes for a fraction of what a bakery would charge for it and use those extra dollars to feed your guests more sheet cake than the standard wedding cake portion (1" X 2" x 4"), serve them a dessert other than cake, or spend the savings on an additonal day in the Bahamas. It's your event; you decide.
3.) Fast service. We have a stock of cakes to choose from, which can be decorated many different ways.
4.) Customization. For a nominal fee, we can make a cake to your unique specifications.
What we are not
All Holiday Rental Cakes are made to look exactly like a fondant-covered cake, without the use of any edible materials. Those fondant-over-Styrofoam cakes are as extremely fragile and intolerant of humidity as a real cake. Here's the actual disclaimer from an outfit which rents the fondant-on-Styrofoam type of cakes:
"Please remember that our cakes are made from fondant, which is a sugary substance, so the cake cannot come in contact with any type of moisture; it will totally damage the cake and you will forfeit your deposit (no fresh flowers for decor, no rain, etc.) They are also very fragile, so if the cake is dropped the sugar fondant will shatter in pieces and cannot be repaired."
Holiday Rental Cakes are far more durable than that. Rough handling will not cause them to shatter. And while it would be best not to get them wet, moisture will not dissolve them. Therefore real flowers and high humidity are no problem. Being placed in direct sunlight will not cause a Holiday cake to melt. Flying insects will not get stuck in the frosting. When you order a cake from us, you can rest assured that you will a.) Get exactly what you ordered and b.) Not have to stress about it throughout the event. A Holiday cake will remain the stunning centerpiece of your decor for the duration of your reception, guaranteed.
Does having a faux cake mean that you can't have a cutting ceremony? Absolutely not!
Below: A faux tier with a section of real cake added
for slicing during cutting ceremony (photo taken prior
to icing in order to show layers):
The finished cake, after cutting:
WE SHIP NATIONWIDE
Announcing our new partnership!
Holiday Rental Cakes has teamed with local chef Terri Fugmann to provide you with edible cake portions or other desserts that will delight your guests! A culinary professional with over twenty years' experience crafting delicious desserts as well as savory goodies for large events or more intimate gatherings, Terri's specialty is working with healthy, organically grown local ingredients. To find out more, contact her at:
Special Occasions Winter Expo '12 Attendees
Don't forget to mention you saw us at the show to take advantage of our Special
Occasions Expo special if you book your event by Valentine's Day!