Goodness, ya’ll. I found the best cake blogger. This week I baked her Mock Royal Wedding cake, printable recipe here. It is a beautiful cake and she bakes with such skill and grace. Can you have a graceful cake? I’m going to say, yes, yes you can. And her instructions and photos are really good, easy to follow, and have great tips & trouble shooting. Check out her blog post here.
One of my 2019 goals is to learn to bake a fancy cake… the kind of cake you would likely find in an English tearoom… or Paris cafe…. or if you live in Texas… La Madeline? Somewhere. The kind of cake that wouldn’t embarrass you. Do you know what I mean? I hate being embarrassed by cake. That’s a thing, right? 🙂
The cost factor… fancy cakes cost a pretty penny, no joke, that’s a fact.
Even one modest slice of cake at a cool cafe or bakery is going to cost you $5 per slice. I have broken down the cost of the royal wedding cake I made this week… and it’s VERY inexpensive. And it’s a lot of cake!
Cost breakdown of the perishable cake ingredients (most from Aldi’s) with an estimated high average price per item. Pantry items are minimal. If you need to purchase those items, I’m including a separate price list too.
Perishable items: estimated cost $10
- eggs 6¢ (you need 14 eggs so buy 2 dozen.).
- milk 15¢ (only need 2/3 of a cup)
- butter $5 (you need a lot of butter!)
- lemons 50¢ each (need 4)
Pantry items: if you need to stock your pantry with these items, the cost would be around $6, plus the $12 elderberry if you chose to use it. You could substitute the elderberry for vanilla extract, I think, or any other extract you would like to pair with lemon.
- white flour $1/bag
- white sugar $2/one pound bag
- baking powder $1
- salt $1
- vanilla $1
- elderberry cordial (from amazon, here.)
My final cost for my cake: around $22 total since I needed to buy the elderberry cordial, here, but had all the other pantry items. If I include replacing my pantry items used, the cost would be $28.
Check out my mock of her mock. hmm. well, obviously it will take 52 cakes for me to master some semblance of mock royal cake bakery…. but it does taste very good. This cake has homemade lemon curd in it, can you imagine! It was very easy to make, and very very tasty.
I’ll keep this cake in the fridge for now, and see how long it takes for the family to eat it. It is very sweet, as in, it has a very sugary sweet taste, just FYI!
Originally I thought it would be challenging and take some time to perfect my cake baking skills. Now, I realize it will definitely take “some time”… maybe all year? Possibly baking one cake per week will give me some skill. Hopefully just skill and not weight. right?
The cost per slice of cake… this is a very heavy, rich cake. Three tiers. With very generous slices, I’m estimating 12 slices. That breaks down to $1.84/slice or $2.34/slice, depending on how many of the ingredients you needed to buy.
There was actually so much lemon curd, that I think I could have easily “halved” that part of the recipe and still had leftover lemon curd. I did ‘half’ the frosting recipe, and had so much leftover I can frost another cake with it.