How much do you spend for a Christmas cake? A few hundreds? Thousands? Or more? Does money matter if you are buying a cake that is ‘not just a cake’, but a custom-made sculpture according to your wish?
From colour palettes to sugar flowers, people are getting more creative with their orders. ‘Custom cakes’ are setting a new trend in the city with many bakeries and entrepreneurs coming up with novel ideas for decorating cakes in unique ways according to the customers’ demand.
“Custom cakes are not just cakes but works of art. Speciality cakes and carved cakes require a lot more time for designing, structuring and decorating. They cannot be treated like just another cake you throw into the oven and hope it comes out right. They are the result of days’ long work preparing decorations, planning, sketching and designing,” said Merlin Rose, a cake designer in the city.
Proprietors of a recently-opened city-based online cake store, ‘The Cakeholic’, said that, “We don’t make cakes, we sculpt cakes, give life to them.”
Exclusively for designer cakes, the customer can place an order there by suggesting a shape or a flavour or an idea or a concept for the cake. The cakes are mainly hand-crafted and, so, it is impossible to find a replica.
The price of customised cakes starts at Rs 1,000 a kilogram. For designer cakes, the price is not decided on the basis of quantity, but of the raw materials and the complexity of designs. Also, orders are often placed not on the basis of weight, but on the number of people to be served.
“Usually, we stick to one cake cutting chart when we make normal cakes. But for designer cakes, the cutting chart also varies and a lot of calculation is needed in their making, especially for stand-up and 3D cakes,” Rose said.
Another trend is to make cakes that resemble various objects related to the festival. A cake design that resembles a Christmas turkey dinner has been a great hit in the social networking sites from the beginning of this festival season.
The price of popular Christmas cake designs with candy cane-flavoured frosting, sugar Christmas trees and Santa faces ranges between Rs 1,000 and Rs 3,000.
Stand-up cakes are much more expensive. Peek-a-boo cakes that are deceptively simple from the outside and with checkered or designed insides once you cut into them are also finding quite a lot of admirers in the city, according to the designers.