I wan to give away a free wedding cake

I guess it's not a bad idea IF you have access to advertising it. Things to consider: are you a legal kitchen? Under cottage food laws? What you are wonting to do may not be acceptable to the 'city fathers/health dept' and get you in serious legal trouble

I would definitely put a limit on the number of servings for the free cake...free cake for 300 would be pretty expensive to you.

Would you be opening yourself up to people that just want free cake? "Oh well I saw where you did a free cake last month, do you want to do another free cake?"

How much advertising at the wedding will you have? How many of those people are potenial wedding cake clients?

what about doing some dummy wedding cakes, you could cover and decorate, take photo's for you portfolio and then peel it all off and decorate the dummies again in another design?
you can use the dummies lots of times if you are carefull when taking the icing off, after that all you need is time

I would recommend putting your resources towards advertising that's aimed at your target market. People who will enter a contest for free cake may not necessarily be the same people who will pay a premium for a quality product.

If you want pictures of wedding cakes for your portfolio you could always decorate dummy tiers.

Not too many people work for free... why would you want to?
Not too many people would want a "practice" wedding cake... why not make wedding dummies for your portfolio until you get the opportunity to make a free wedding cake for a friend/family member? Then start selling them when you feel you're completely ready.

Yep! And it's less stressful too!

I did a wedding cake contest where I let brides write in and tell me what weirdo cake they wanted, then I chose the one that I wnted to do. It wasn't a random drawing, and I got to decide the final design after getting ideas from the bride.

If you're going to do this then make sure you milk it for as much publicity as you can. Blog about it, use facebook and twitter and press releases to publicize the contest. Run it for at least a month to give people time to find out about it and enter the contest. I did all of that and ended up getting a lot of response, and the cake ended up on several larger blogs. Here's a photo of it and links to the earlier blog posts about it: http://acaketorememberva.blogspot.com/2011/10/robot-wedding-cake.html

You definitely want to set parameters, put a limit on the number of servings, and make sure that you have the final say on the design. If you're doing this to get publicity you want to make sure it isn't a design that's been done a million times before.

I made all of my family wedding cakes to get the pictures. I would never do it for a stranger.

costumeczar, good idea, but you are established and experienced with all of the resources in place for publicity. I can't see this working in the OP scenario. She doesn't have the audience.

It could work if you were willing to do some legwork, though, If you just want to say "I'm giving away a cake" and expect to have people beating down your door you'll be disappointed. If you use it as an opportunity to introduce yourself to a bunch of wedding planners, bridal shops, rental shops, florists, photographers, etc, it could benefit you in the long run if you're trying to break into the weding market.

I'm president of my city's bridal association, and weddings are an incredibly incentuous business. People refer to people they know. I get a lot of people emailing me trying to get information about joining and their businesses are too new. If someone contacted me about this kind of thing I'd give them some names of people to contact to try to spread the word, maybe other businesses who were also new and wanted to have something that they could use to get hte word out about their own businesss. Once they got the notice out they could run something like a "best engagement stroy contest" on their facebook page, then get other people to cross-promote it. It could be done, but it would take some work.

Actually, you could also partner up with some other businesses and do a gift package for a wedding if they were agreeable to it. Do the best proposal contest or a how-we-met contest or something like that, then have people on facebook vote for the winner. The contestants would be having their friends vote, so they'd see your facebook page, word would spread, blah blah blah. I've got a million of them.

Actually, this kind of thing would be a good excuse to introduce yourself to a bunch of wedding pros in a short itme.