I was recently at a double birthday party where the mom bought two cakes, one for each son. She ordered cake for 50 people, and the bakery provided her with two 12” cakes. By my chart, a 12” cake feeds 45, she didn’t need that much cake! The result was that ¾ of one cake was consumed, even though she wanted 50 slices, not every person wanted cake and the second cake stayed untouched. Although some people might think that getting more cake is great, getting double of what you need can be a nuisance (the mom didn’t know what to do with so much extra cake) and just plain wasteful. From my experience, the bakeries that are willing to “give” cake away usually use less quality ingredients and are attempting to attract the customer by quantity instead of quality.
There is a ton of different cake serving charts out there. You will find charts that say an 8” cake serves 8, some that say it serves 28, and other charts will list every number in between! Some charts claim to be for party portions and some for wedding portions. I personally think that a slice of cake is a slice of cake!
So how many servings does an 8” cake actually have?! Of course it will depend on how you cut it. Not only the slice size, but how you actually cut the slices.
This picture illustrates how many slices you would get from an 8” cake depending on how big of a slice you cut. (These slices are about 4” high.)
I go by the slice in the middle, in which an 8” cake serves 20. Although the slice on the left might seem reasonable for some, I like having a more generous serving, this way I know that my customers won’t ever run out cake. The slice on the right is just unrealistic to me. I feel like most people would not eat their whole serving and cake would just go to waste. Plus it would look like a brick on a plate!
How you go about cutting the cake can also affect the amount of slices you would get.
Some cut a round cake like if it was a square cake. I am not a big fan of this approach. You end up getting a few slices that are much smaller than others and some of the slices end up getting too much of frosting/fondant from the sides. So although this picture shows 26 servings, I would only count 20.
I prefer to cut round cakes using the concentric circles way. For this method you cut a circle 2” in from the edge of the cake and cut slices about 1.5” thick. On an 8” cake you get two circles, but on a larger cake you would end up with more concentric circles. You can notice from the picture bellow how all the slices are about the same size and there is no waste.
Based on slices that are 1.5” x 2” x 4” and by using the concentric way to cut round cake, this is what my round cake serving chart looks like:
I have found that most often I end up getting even a few more slices than listed above since my cakes are taller about 4.5" high.
I hope this was helpful!
Best!
Renata