This weekend from my regular venue I received an order for each of 10 tables to get a 6" square cake done in swiss dots and a border, and then a 6"/4" small tiered for the bride and groom.

What I did was charge my regular $4/serving for the design...of course with individual tables, each cake serves 12 and there will only be like 97 ppl at the wedding so I'm getting paid for extra servings.

And then I charged a $10 surcharge per table.

However today as I'm working on them, I think I undercharged....it just feels like SOOO much more work. 11 boards to wrap and ribbon....12 little cakes to layer and fill and coat...and on my WORD all these squares to ice! And its taking a lot more icing than a regular tiered cake to serve 100.

I wrote my venue lady and just casually said I'd be charging more next time and she didn't say anything about it....not sure if I'm being greedy? What do you think? Was $600 and some odd dollars fair for this order and I'm just grumpy because they're all squares? haha.

Possibly grumpy because they're squares

I don't think you undercharged, but if YOU feel like you did, then you did. It depends on how much extra time it would take you to do all of the boards, etc., and what would make it worth your while.

I had an order a few months ago where I had to make 17 - 6 inch table cakes and it was the hugest pain in the a$$. I totally undercharged and I was grumpy the entire time I was doing it.

Next time I will charge the moon and the stars to discourage someone ordering table cakes. It is exponentially more work, not to mention I struggled with finding somewhere to store 17 boxed up cakes before delivery.

If I were you, I would charge nearly double my regular rate next time. Good luck!

Yeah...normally for a 100 serving tiered cake, its maybe 4 tiers (12/10/8/6) and takes maybe an hour and a half in the morning to make icing, make filling, torte, fill, crumb coat the tiers. Then another hour and a half in the afternoon to ice rounds smooth. Then after dinner an hour to stack and decorate (basic designs).

Today I spent like from 9:15am until about 11:45am making icing, filling, torting, cutting, filling, crumb coating these cakes.

Then started around 12:30pm to ice them all and got them done around 4pm (had to stop and make another batch of icing.)

Still have to put them on the boards, border them, and swiss dot them.

They don't even look that good. Usually with tiers you can kinda hide any mistakes, arrange the tiers to the best side pointing out, etc.... but I didn't have time to stand around icing and re-icing and re-icing today so I did the best I could. (Squares....and sometimes the more I mess with them, the worse they get.)

Cranky! haha.

(What's more...I wrote the venue to find out if flowers are going on the top of each one. Nope. PINWHEELS?!)

Great... if the bride and groom dress like some of the weirdos you see from the "fashion" shows... or worse, hair done like the hair shows.

Pinwheels are great..... for 4 year olds...<sigh>

And don't forget to put a bird on it too!

Actually, I chose to do centerpiece cakes for DD's wedding. And I often recommended them for medium sized weddings. I always thought they were super easy! BUT, these were my rules: round only. I would not take a square cake order at all, don't even ask. I got to (at least mostly) choose the flavors. I could cover the boards weeks in advance, get all the cakes baked, torted and in the freezer and becasue they were rounds, whip out the icing pretty quick. Each 6" cake serves twelve and that's how they were charged, with a little upcharge for the board and foil to cover it. I love them!!

I did a bunch of small cakes for a wedding 4 or 5 years ago and I ordered the boards pre done and charged her for it. I was not going to stand around covering 15 - 7" round boards. And really, with the whole cost of thing, the extra $3 per board wasn't so big in her cost and saved me time and energy. Now when people write me about centerpiece or mini cakes, I just roll that in to the cost.

The Wilton charts say a 6 inch square serves 18, so if you charged for 12 servings per cake as for a 6 inch round, then with 10 cakes you gave away 60 servings of cake. So with that alone I'd be grumpy--not even to mention all the extra boards to cover and the pain of many little cakes.

I did almost 30, 4 inch square cakes stencilled on all 4 sides in June. I will NEVER do square centerpiece cakes again, ONLY round.

[quote="salsaman42"]I did almost 30, 4 inch square cakes stencilled on all 4 sides in June. I will NEVER do square centerpiece cakes again, ONLY round.[/quote]

THAT'S the secret! Sooooo much easier.