Cakes Or Cupcakes For A Birthday Party

Birthdays come round once a year and the cake is the part people photograph. Cupcakes now turn up at as many parties as the star of the party, the birthday cake, and the two are not the same order at all. One is a single object that has to be carried in, cut and handed out. The other is thirty servings that never need a knife.

Nearly every argument about which to choose comes back to that. Four things settle it.

Budget

Cupcakes are the cheaper order at small numbers and stop being cheaper somewhere around forty guests. The reason is decorating time. A cupcake is iced one at a time, so the finishing cost climbs with the guest list, while a cake is decorated once whether eight people eat it or eighty.

Mini cupcakes are the genuinely cheap answer, with one caveat learned the hard way: people take two. Count them as three-quarters of a serve. And anything custom, a piped name or a printed image, is one piece of work on a cake and thirty on a tray.

Theme

A theme goes onto a cake far more easily than onto cupcakes. A cake has a flat top and tall sides, which is room for a scene. A cupcake gives you a circle six centimetres across that holds one topper, so a themed tray is the same small decoration repeated thirty times.

The compromise most parents land on beats both: one small themed cake for the candles and the photograph, plain cupcakes around it for everyone to eat.

Number of Guests

Cupcakes are counted by heads: one each plus about ten per cent, because a few adults take a second and a few children lick the icing and abandon the rest.

Cakes are counted by slices, and a party slice is smaller than the one you would cut at home. A six-inch round is about twelve party slices, an eight-inch about twenty-four. Above roughly fifty guests the cake wins on cost and the cupcakes win on service, because with a cake somebody has to stand there with a knife, a jug of hot water and a cloth while the party waits.

Expectations

If a five-year-old has spent a month telling people there is a mermaid cake, make it a mermaid cake. That is not sentiment, it is scheduling. Decorated cakes and cupcakes need two to three business days with us, and the day a parent discovers the theme has changed is almost always the day before the party. Ask the child once, early, and order it.

Cakes have always been part of a birthday, and candles are the reason. A candle wants one object and one moment. Cupcakes are gaining on them every year, but here is what a cake still does better.

1. Cakes are worth your time

Cupcakes are fifteen minutes in the oven and a swirl on top. A layer cake is baking, cooling, filling, crumb-coating, chilling and finishing, which is most of a day and most of that day is waiting. The waiting is what you are paying for. The crumb coat and the fridge time are the only things stopping the sides bulging in a warm room.

2. Cakes are versatile

There is a hard limit on what fits on a cupcake and almost none on a cake. Wider, taller, stacked in tiers, carved into a shape, or an edible image printed across the whole top. If the design needs more than one idea in it, it needs a cake.

3. Cakes make you feel special

Finding a cake with your name on it lands differently from being handed a cupcake off a tray. A cake is addressed to one person. A tray is addressed to the room.

4. Cakes are a party attraction

A cake is furniture. Put it on its own table and it runs the party for you, telling people where to gather and that a moment is coming. Cupcakes get carried off one at a time, which is convenient and completely invisible.

5. Cakes are memorable

First birthdays make the case on their own. The smash cake video only exists because there was a cake to smash. Ask an adult what they remember of being seven and it is often a cake shaped like something.

6. Cake slices can be customised

Cupcakes come in one size. Some guests want a sliver and some want a corner with extra icing, and only a knife gives you both.

7. Cakes are timeless

First birthday, twenty-first, eighty-first: the same object works and only the decoration changes. Cupcakes read as a children's party or an office morning tea, and it is hard to make a tray of them feel like a milestone.

8. Cakes satisfy your sweet tooth

A cupcake is one flavour the whole way through. A cake can be three at once, chiffon with passionfruit curd, chocolate with salted caramel, sponge with cream and sliced fruit. The filling is also what keeps it moist, because a cut cake dries from the cut face. At a long party, press the offcut back against it between servings.

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9. Cakes make us happy

A single candle stuck into a cupcake looks like an apology. The same candle on a cake is the photograph that stays on the fridge for a year.

10. Cakes are the best

Not always, honestly. Cupcakes travel better, scale better and go home in a serviette. But if you want one moment where the room stops and looks at the same thing, that thing has to be a cake.

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Not every birthday needs either. If you want to skip cake and cupcakes, three pastries do the same job, and each has a rule that decides whether it survives a Brisbane afternoon.

Doughnuts

A doughnut wall or a wooden peg stand looks like more effort than it is, and it solves serving the same way cupcakes do. One each, no plates, no knife.

The rule is timing. A doughnut is at its best for about four hours. Glaze turns tacky in humidity and yeast doughnuts stale faster than any cake, so they want to arrive on the morning of the party, not the night before, and to stay out of the fridge.

Crepes

A crepe cake is twenty or thirty thin pancakes stacked with cream between them, sliced into layers fine enough that people assume it was difficult. It mostly asks for patience.

The rule is temperature. It has no structure of its own, so it holds cold and slumps warm, about thirty minutes out of the fridge in January before it starts to lean. Cut it late and put the rest straight back.

Cream puffs

A tower of cream puffs is the best-looking dessert here and the most demanding. Choux is crisp while it is empty and soft the moment it is filled, so it gets filled as late as possible. A puff filled at nine is a wet puff by lunch.

If the tower is held together with caramel, humidity is the enemy again. Outdoors it goes sticky within the hour. Build it inside, serve it inside, and let people pull it apart by hand.

Cake, cupcakes or pastries, all three feed a room and all three photograph well.

The two real mistakes are ordering late and ordering too much. Decorated cakes and cupcakes need two to three business days, everything is made by hand in our Fortitude Valley kitchen, and an order in by 4pm goes out the next day, delivery from $19 across more than 50 Brisbane suburbs, Saturday at the same rate.

On quantity, order slightly less than feels safe. A cake nobody finishes is not generosity, it is a foil-covered tray still in the fridge on Monday.