Build the cake. Count the slices. Then ring Tracy.
Heavenly Bites Bakes is Tracy, on her own, in her own kitchen in Illingworth. Every cake is made to order for one particular day. Nothing is baked in advance and nothing sits in a window.
Most people stall on the same question, and it is not the flavour. It is how big the thing needs to be. So that is where this starts.
A cake is sold by the size of the tin.
Eight inches across, four inches deep. That is one tier, and it is the unit everything else is built from — the size you will be asked for, and the size a price is worked out against.
Depth barely varies. A tier is four inches whether it is a birthday cake or the bottom of a wedding cake, which is why the only number that really moves is the one across the top.
Then it is only the area of the top.
A finger slice is an inch square, cut through the full depth, and it is what gets handed round at a wedding. Score the top into inch squares and the number of slices is simply how many squares fit.
A party slice is twice as wide — a slice on a plate, with a fork, when the cake is the pudding. Same cake, half as many people.
A circle throws the corners away.
Square the same tin off and nothing else changes — same tin size, same depth, same cake — but there is about a quarter more of it, because the corners are no longer being wasted.
If the number comes out tight, that is the cheapest place to find more. It is worth knowing before you go up a tin size.
Tiers are not one big cake. They are several.
Each one sits on its own board and gets counted on its own, so the total is just the tiers added up. A 10, an 8 and a 6 together come to about 157 finger slices.
Which is also why a tiered cake is a different kind of job. It takes planning before it takes baking, and the date matters more than anything else you can tell her.
