RANT! - Page 3  

 

 

 

 

that's too cool--how was the cake???

 

and you don't look a day over 40!!!!

 

 

 

she drove there so she could didn't have to pay the $500?

Hey do you have a picture of your Duff cake.  I'm sure we would all like to see what you get for your money.  I don't do cakes for money cos living in the country people think that your time is worth nothing if you work from home and I value my time too much.  Can earn more working at a supermarket and without the stress!
 

OP - I'm sorry you had a run in with this PITA client. Don't you just feel like smacking them when they waste your time like that?

 

I think the pricing was on the money, if not on the cheap side.

 

SOME people want an edible work of art, for the price of "just a cake". Whether its made of marble, or sugar, eggs, flour and butter...its still a work of art that takes 40, 50 or 60 hours to complete.

 

However, there are some people who get it! So stay positive and hold on the the plans for another time :-) Even just researching them has given your brain a better understanding of how to put a plane cake together.

 

Oh, and Jess155, I sold a cake last year to serve 30 people. The price was $3000 exactly. So its a bit presumptuous to assume $1500 is too much for some poeple for a custom, highly detailed cake.

What ever happened to , YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR. If you want quality than you pay for it, or wedding cakes would be as cheasp as a slab.

Do you think maybe the client was expressing themselves poorly, and expected something that was recognizable as the exact plane and the medals, rather than an exact scale replica? Even then I suspect her $100-150 budget was too low, but still.

EVOIR i'd love to see the $3000 cake!!! do you have a picture??

Ohhh I want to see the picture of the duff cake, pretty please!!

I' ll try to post a picture, I'm not sure how, I'll have to wait for my daughter to help me. I'm a big fan of David Bowie so the cake was a picture of him from his Aladdin sane album.

Cool!!

I get requests for life-like 3-D cakes often and have found it helpful to up front tell them that the price of a cake of that magnitude is based on the hours it takes to create not the number of servings.  I will direct them to a 3-D cake in my portfolio and tell them for instance, that cake was $$$. If meeting in person they sometimes will gasp and stammer and say, "I had no idea!" Sometimes they say, well it's what I want so let's price it out and we move forward.

 

I just did a quote for a groom's cake that is going to cost almost as much as a wedding cake.  It's to be a guitar. I told them that for $ they could have a guitar shape with butter cream piping . For $$, it could have some fondant and detailing.  But, if they wanted it to be realistic then it will cost $$$ because of the time involved.  Their choice.  

I want to see Evoir 's $3000 cakes AND the Duff cake! I have to say I wasn't impressed with the couple episodes I saw. Mostly foam covered fondant, not even RKT, like Buddy. I use as much CAKE for my CAKES as humanly possible, but it has to at least be edible, unless it is for support, like straws, or dowels, or PVC pipe. 

I'd like to post a pic of my biggest order to date (the $3k cake) but I don't have permission from the client to share the photos online. I've been meaning to catch up over a coffee with her for months, so I could grab some of her professional pix of the event. We've both been too busy! I have some of my photos of course, but her photographer's will be better!

They want a "Cake Boss" cake at a Walmart price! I no longer price to please customer I price to recoup my costs to make the cake and my labor.

 

That's just it, isn't it?  They want the WOW factor but they don't want to pay for it.

 

I experience the opposite problem.  I'm one of those (horror!) supermarket decorators (albeit with 20+ years of experience), and I can't tell you how many times we've had customers coming in asking us if we can do X or Y in wedding-cake-tasting-decorating detail because they either saw the cake on TV or in a book or they want something different, whatever.

 

We have to tell them that we're not equipped to do X or Y.   We tell them that they'd be better served going to one of the many freestanding bakeries in the area because they'd be better able to produce the kind of cake they want.

Almost always the response is a version of, "I'm not going there!  It's too expensive!"

 

:headdesk:

In the current Rachel Ray magazine it tells brides that if they are on a budget they should go to the grocery store.  There's a blurb in there about how many will do the design that you want (shaking my head).