Here are some of the main reasons why people should have higher budgets in mind when it comes to custom cakes.

A beautiful cake makes a great centrepiece for any party or wedding. And when regular store-bought cakes don’t fit your party/wedding theme, there are lots of bakers in Malaysia who can create a custom-designed cake for you according to your theme and designs.

But how much does a custom cake cost?

Also known as theme cakes, custom cakes are typically more expensive compared to what you can buy in the store. At Recommend.my, we often get the odd request for custom cakes where the budget and requirements simply don’t add up.

For example, we get requests for a two-tier fondant birthday cake to feed 60 people, where the budget is RM150. That’s RM2.50 per “slice”, which is simply not achievable.

1. Creativity and Design in Custom Cakes

The keyword here is “custom”. When you order custom cakes, you are asking for a cake that is created by hand, to meet your exact specifications. That takes time and a great deal of creativity. The baker may need to meet you to discuss ideas, and even if you sent your baker a photo and said “please follow this design”, the baker will need to figure out the best way to match the photo, and adapt it to your theme.

2. Ingredients used

You might think that a cake is just flour, eggs, sugar and butter. But custom cakes can contain much more than that. Special creations could include imported ingredients like beetroot, avocado, white chocolate, and other exotic fruits and spices (don’t forget the alcohol!). Many bakers also work with organic ingredients to improve the flavour and quality. Then there is also the added care in the ingredients that go into making a custom-designed halal cake.

And if you want to feed more people, the number of ingredients will increase as well. From just four eggs for a regular 1kg cake, a three-tier cake may need as many as 24 eggs, making your custom cake cost way more!

3. Specialised training and tools

Decorating is an art, and any artist needs special tools. We’re talking about 12 different rolling pins with different embossing patterns on them. Or 30 different piping tips, and airbrushes. Or gum paste modelling tools that look more at home in an operating room than a kitchen.

And for all these tools, you need skills to use them. Bakers have built up their expertise over years and years of painstaking dedication. They go for various courses (many overseas) to upgrade their skills, and for every successful cake, they have a long list of failed experiments that never got sold. All to improve their workmanship.

4. Creation time

How much effort actually goes into a cake? With all the time spent with design, shopping for ingredients, mixing, baking, cooling, decorating and delivery, a single cake could take as much as 40 hours to make. The cakes you find in regular retail stores are usually made according to a pre-designed template. Behind the scenes, there is a huge kitchen operation to churn them out. Such large kitchens can create several cakes a day, with many of them frozen so they can be sold at a later date.

But with custom designs, each cake is made to order. That means that any toppers, fondant layers and special ingredients need to be purchased and prepared specifically for that cake. and can take up to a day to prepare. The more colours there are, the more prep will be needed, too.

Complex toppers can also add a tremendous amount of time to the cake. For example, a single hand-sculpted peony flower could take 4 hours. Yes, it will look awesome, but if you ask for “a bouquet of sculpted roses”, prepare for your custom cake cost to increase!

5. Handling and delivery

The bigger they are, the harder it is to transport. Many bakers are skilled artists, but they are usually one-man operations. Without proper goods van and refrigeration, it can be a huge challenge to delivery your beautiful cake to an outdoor wedding in the foothills of Pahang (for example). Every baker is holding their breath until the moment it is safely in the client’s hands.

At the end of the day, customers want a cake that not only tastes better than anything they can buy at the store but looks fantastic and unique as well. A custom cake is perfect for your special occasion, but before you order, think about the design, complexity, and effort that goes into it, and adjust your budget accordingly.