Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

Recently, the Budget Guru was in contact with cake tailor Lauri DiTunno, of Cake Alchemy here in New York. (We featured Lauri’s supercreative confections in our 2010 Wedding Trends story.) True to form, the BG asked Lauri for a couple of quickie cost-cutting tips, and she whipped these right up:

• Let’s say you’re having 200 guests, Lauri hypothesizes. Buy a cake for presentation purposes that is fully decorated ($18 per person) AND a sheet cake ($6 per person), which then averages out to $12 per person. (Shades of math class, no?) Put the gorgeous decorated cake on display and the sheet cake in the kitchen. When the sheet cake is cut and served, it will look exactly the same on the inside as the tiered tower.
• You can also keep prices down by choosing two-dimensional decorations, such as cut outs and embossing, instead of three-dimensional embellishments like flowers and other more fancy-schmancy choices.
• Lauri adds that any simple, less labor-intensive decoration will save you plenty of sugar, I mean, money. So go for a bow, for example, instead of sugar blooms. Or if you’re set on flowers, choose a simpler kind of bloom, like a sugar calla lily, which takes relatively few steps to make. Who knew??
  
  Lauri sent along a simple cake design that costs only $10 per person.

Posted by Susan at 4:58 p.m.