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A wedding cake gets a paid tasting before any deposit locks a date, and nothing books inside five days.
Wedding tiers, celebration cakes and hand-iced cookie trays, all built against a real spec rather than a guess. Below are the numbers you can check against your own guest list before you ever pick up the phone.
Every cake that leaves the decorating bench is priced the same way: a per-serving or per-item number you can multiply yourself, not a quote that appears after a phone call. That is deliberate. A bride working out a budget for eighty guests should be able to do the arithmetic at eleven at night without waiting for a callback, and a parent ordering three dozen cookies for a birthday party should know the total before they hang up.
The two decorators on staff split their week between wedding tiers, celebration cakes and cookie trays, and the calendar is shared across all three. That is the practical reason a wedding order needs five days of notice and a celebration cake usually does not — a two-layer round takes a fraction of the bench time a three-tier wedding cake does, so it can slot into a gap the wedding calendar leaves open. A wedding tier cannot, because building and crumb-coating three tiers, chilling between coats, and piping or setting fondant work takes real hours that do not compress just because someone asks nicely.
Buttercream here is butter, sugar, and egg whites. No shortening, no whipped topping, and no substituting in a stabilizer to make a rush timeline easier to hit. Fondant is available on any of the three items below, but it is never the default finish, and a bride who wants an all-fondant wedding cake should ask for it specifically at the tasting rather than assume it is included.
Wedding Tier Cake
Standard finish is Italian meringue buttercream, smoothed by hand rather than a mechanical smoother, which is why the surface reads soft rather than sculpted-flat. Fondant is available on request for a cleaner architectural look or for sugar-work details, but it sits over the same buttercream crumb coat rather than replacing it. Cake bases run vanilla butter, chocolate fudge, or a marble of the two, filled with buttercream or a fruit curd depending on what you taste and like at the appointment.
Servings are figured on a standard 1-inch by 2-inch wedge, the same convention most bakeries use for tiered cakes, so the numbers below are a planning guide rather than a promise about exact slice count on the day. Tier counts and diameters are our recommendation for hitting a given headcount efficiently — a couple can ask for a different stack of diameters and the price still follows the serving count, not the tier arrangement.
| Servings | Typical stack | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 24 | Two tier, 6" + 9" | $156.00 |
| 36 | Two tier, 8" + 11" | $234.00 |
| 50 | Three tier, 6" + 9" + 12" | $325.00 |
| 75 | Three tier, 8" + 11" + 14" | $487.50 |
| 100 | Four tier, 6" + 9" + 12" + 15" | $650.00 |
Below 24 servings, a wedding-style tiered cake is priced as a Celebration Cake instead — see the second item on this page. Deposit and cancellation terms are set out in full on the terms page.
Why five days is the floor, not a suggestion
Gum-paste and modeling work — the sugar flowers, the piped lattice, any character or figure work built out of fondant — needs real setting time on a rack before it can travel. A flower rushed to save two days is still soft in the middle when it goes in the car, and it either slumps on the drive over or crushes the moment a tier gets set on top of it. That is the single most common way a wedding cake actually fails, and it happens because someone tried to compress a schedule that has a physical limit, not because of anything a decorator did wrong on the day.
Rush wedding orders under five days: we say no. It is not a pricing lever and there is no rush fee that changes the answer — the sugar work needs time to set, full stop, and a cake that looks fine in the shop on Thursday afternoon can be a different story by the time it reaches a reception hall on Saturday if it never had the hours to cure. A tasting appointment and a five-day floor together are what let this shop promise a cake that survives its own trip.
Celebration Cake
This is the birthday-and-anniversary side of the decorating bench, and the reason it can usually go same-week when a wedding tier cannot: it is a single two-layer round, or at most a two-tier stack, with a simple piped border rather than sculpted sugar work. That keeps the bench time down to a fraction of what a wedding cake takes, so it fits into whatever gap is left in the week's schedule.
Base size is an 8-inch two-layer round feeding roughly ten to twelve people depending on how the slices get cut. Diameter steps up from there at a flat $14 per inch, and going to a two-tier stack simply adds the two diameters' cost together — there is no separate tiering fee, because the labor difference between a single round and a two-tier is smaller than most people assume.
| Diameter | Approx. servings | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 8" | 10–12 | $68.00 |
| 9" | 13–15 | $82.00 |
| 10" | 16–20 | $96.00 |
| 11" | 21–25 | $110.00 |
| 12" | 26–32 | $124.00 |
Single-tier or two-tier only — a celebration cake does not go to three tiers. Above roughly 30 servings, most customers do better ordering a Wedding Tier Cake instead, priced per serving rather than by diameter.
Custom Cookie & Favor Trays
Cut-out sugar cookies, hand-piped in royal icing rather than a flooded glaze, which holds a cleaner edge and packs better for favors. The standard round cutter set — a plain circle in two sizes, iced in one or two colors — has no order minimum, so a single dozen for a small gathering is a normal order.
Custom shapes are a different job: a new cutter or template, color-matching to an invitation or theme, and more piping detail per cookie, so those carry a three-dozen minimum to make the setup worth the bench time. Favor bags or individual wrapping can be added at the same time as the order if a wedding or shower needs the cookies pre-packaged for guests to take home.
| Quantity | Design | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 1 dozen | Standard round cutter, 1–2 colors | $42.00 |
| 2 dozen | Standard round cutter, 1–2 colors | $84.00 |
| 3 dozen | Custom shape, matched palette | $126.00 |
| 6 dozen | Custom shape, matched palette | $252.00 |
Custom shapes: three-dozen minimum. Standard round cutter: no minimum. Both are hand-piped, not machine-flooded.
Wedding and celebration cake orders go through the same three steps. Cookie trays skip the tasting and move straight from inquiry to a scheduled bake date.
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Book the tasting
A tasting appointment is a paid sit-down at the shop, not a free sample plate handed over with a sales pitch. You taste two or three cake-and-filling combinations built from the same recipes that go on the actual order, plus the buttercream on its own.
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Settle the spec
Flavor, filling, finish, tier count or diameter, and any fondant work get written down at the tasting. This becomes the order spec — the same numbers that show up in the tables above.
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Deposit locks the date
A deposit against the final price reserves the date on the decorating calendar. The balance is due on pickup or delivery, and the remake and cancellation terms are set out in full on the terms page.
A wedding cake gets a tasting appointment first. We don't ship blind.
Rush jobs are the failure mode we see most often, almost always from a couple who booked a venue and a photographer months out but left the cake for the last week. The oven and the bench do not know that the invitations already went out. If the date is inside five days, the honest answer is a Celebration Cake sized up as far as it reasonably goes, not a wedding tier built on a compressed schedule that risks the whole thing on delivery day.
For the sourdough, laminated pastry, and pie side of the ovens, see the bakery and café page. For the people running the bench and the oven, and the nine-year history of the starter, see the about page.
Ready to book a tasting
Send an inquiry with a date and a rough guest count, or call the shop directly. A tasting appointment gets scheduled within the week for most dates.