8 Cost-Cutting Cake Tricks

Are you ready to spend hundreds of dollars on dessert? The average price of a wedding cake these days is $543, which can make a serious dent in your wedding budget. These tips can help.

Budget-conscious brides who want an expensive-looking cake at a reasonable price can now have their cake and eat it too! Check out our favorite ways to make your confectionary dreams come true.

Double Duty
Find out if your caterer works as a baker too. Many hotels, country clubs, and larger catering companies have a pastry chef on staff. Often, if you use the staff pastry chef versus a designer from an outside bakery, you'll avoid cake-cutting fees, service fees, additional tips, and delivery costs.

Something for Everyone
Go ahead -- give 'em what they want. Order several smaller cakes in different flavors and serve them together on a dessert table. By sparing your designer major assembly and decoration time, not only will you cut your costs tremendously, you'll get a bite of tiramisu AND cherry chocolate cheesecake.

Flower Power
Flowers are one of the most beautiful and inexpensive ways to decorate a cake. To further cut costs, adopt a "less is more" motto, keeping sugar decorations to a minimum and letting your fresh blooms take center stage.

Nice Sheets
Your fantasy cake costs a fortune, but the look and taste are just right. What to do? Order a smaller-size cake and have your baker make sheet cakes from the same recipe. After you cut the cake, pose for pictures, and feed each other the first bite, your caterer can whisk the cake behind the scenes where it’ll be supplemented with sheet cake. Trust us -- no one will know the difference.

The Satellite Discovery
A satellite cake is created when an upper layer of cake is separated from a lower layer. The lower layer serves as the cake's "base." Essentially, satellite cakes are used when the cake needs to be built "out" as well as "up" and when the cost of creating a tall cake is too much. If you're a bride in need of a towering, multilayer cake, ask your baker about adding satellites instead of tiers. It's a beautiful solution to an otherwise pricey problem.

Wedding Rentals
If you’re not really into cake but love the aesthetic, you can now rent a fake one for your wedding day. Sites like CakeRental.com offer striking replicas that come with a discrete slit filled with real cake for cake-cutting photos. You can either rent one from the vendor or design your own for half the cost of a real cake.

Square Edges
Boxy cakes are mod, but they’re difficult to build and frost. It takes time and patience to even out all those edges, so if money's an object, go for more traditional, round layers.

Something Borrowed
Your cake is new, so why not borrow from the past for accessories like cake toppers and cutting knives? After sifting though Grandma's hope chest or Mom's china cabinet, you might just find another way to honor brides of the past, revive the life of an heirloom, and save money while you're at it! Summer Krecke