A question re: M&S cakes .... help please

Thats the cake i'm having. The cakes are staying on the boards. When put on pillars you will get a decent height, if you stack em one on top then yes they are a bit on the low side... but then mine might be on a cake stand too which will lever it up

Hi Teehee - do you know if the 5.5cm height they quote on the website includes the board? I will keep them on the borads too.

Thanks for any more replies in advance, sorry I gotta go to work now but will be back on later.

No I dont think so, the catalogue says 5.5 for the tier so Id add 2cms for the board...

so the 3 tiers together are 7.5cms x 3 with the height of your pillars inbetween and my pillars are about 10cm high??

I dont do maths lolol....

They are alway very popular so I don'y think they can be so small.

I had one for the engagement party, and didnt stack it but it wasn't that shallow. i know wedding cakes you get made can be something like 8 cm deep, but honestly you cant really tell the difference. Maybe go into M&S and have a look at the ones on the shelf? they have them out on display. And they had them on 3 for 2 when i was in the store buying mine.

We are having that cake too. We are having it exactly like in the pic - i just ordered the flowers.

Other supermarked cakes are smaller than the m+s ones deffinatly, becasue i compared all of them beofre i chose who to go with. Waitrose do cakes but in the same way as marks does their wedding cakes and i dont think you can get the 3 seperate teirs from waitrose.

Hi there

M&S cakes are quite a bit shallower than you would get from a cake maker, however, unless you have two cakes standing next to one another no one will be looking at the depth of the cakes.

The depth they mention is the depth of the cake and does not include the board which is 12mm so you can add on just over 1cm to each of the tiers.

I do think that they are best displayed on the pillars that M&S sell with them though as they are also smaller than standard cake pillars so the whole cake looks in proportion when set up.

Most cake stands are made for cakes both bigger in diametre and deeper than the M&S ones, although I hire stands to lots of customers having M&S cakes and have a smaller one especially for this so that the gaps between the tiers do not look too big. It might be worth looking around locally to see if someone has a smaller stand you could hire.

Attached is the only picture I have of an M&S cake on a stand which I use to illustrate to my hire customers who are having supermarket cakes that it's better to go for a smaller version.

http://www.photobox.co.uk/my/photo?album_id=104323352&photo_id=2045744210

If you are anywhere near Reading, Berkshire and are interested in hiring a stand pls get in touch.

HTH
Catherine

Hello,

I have had a look at these cakes, and I too was thinking along the same lines as you. I have seen that they do pillars that you can stack the cakes as the picture in your post, have you thought about this?

Alternatively, you can get cake stands that don't necessarily stack one above the other, so you wouldnt notice so much of a gap? IYKWIM??

Danni x

We had an M&S cake and everyone commented afterwards how lovely it tasted. I was also worried that it would look quite small but it never. We decided to go with a swan stand before we got the cake as if they weren't deep it wouldn't look so odd. On the boards they are a good height.

Hi, yes this is the type of stand I meant! Do you mind me asking where you got yours from? Danni x

The hotel had it. Always ask at your venue if they have things such as cake stands, table numbers and holders and what bits they have for table centres. We were going to use table centres from the hotel until my mum thought it would be fun to make our own.

We had a 3 tier fruit cake and an extra large sponge which was meant to be kept in the kitchen for cutting. The staff put them all out on our 3 tier spiral stand (hired from a local catering shop) but we removed the small top tier and put that aside for cutting. The height was OK but the small tier was very small! This was too much cake for 100 guests BTW!

Thanks everyone.

Catherinecakes - thats really useful info, thanks. Unfortunately not near Reading area.

Digitalskittles - your cake looks lovely, was that the ivory one?

Thinking now I may try and stack them instead, as I think the stand gap is going to be too big. I have never stacked a cake, are they easy enough to stack? We are having the largest one as fruit and the other 2 are sponge, I know the fruit has to go at the bottom. Don't want any cake dramas the day before thats all.

If you decide to stack the cakes, make sure you insert dowelling rods into both of the bottom tiers.

These can be purchased from any sugarcraft shop, and must be cut to exactly the same length as each other.

I had the same cake but in ivory-it was absolutely fine, I bought some ribbon in our colour scheme from JL and had the florist make a small arrangement for each tier. It didnt look too small/thin and we had it on a 3 tier stand too

HTH

Hi donnaj36, actually I did a search on cake toppers and a picture of your cake came up in a thread. It looked gorgeous! Where did you get that stand from? You obviously took the cakes off the M&S boards? They looked a lot shiner than the ones on the M&S website.

?! The cake stand was one that the caterer hired, I think it was a pretty standard one-I`m sure she left the cake on the M and S boards too. I was really unsure how to do the pillars so bought the dowels and rods from M and S (things that hold the pillars up evidently!) and the caterer fixed it up for us.