How to Choose a Cake Maker

Six things, and none of them is the photographs. A portfolio tells you what somebody's best work looks like; the list below tells you whether the cake will arrive, be safe to eat and cost what you were told.

1. The hygiene rating. Anyone selling food, including from a home kitchen, must be registered with their local council, and the inspection result is public.
2. An allergen answer in writing. Not a reassurance — a statement of what is in the cake and what the kitchen handles.
3. What the quote includes. Finish, writing, board, box, delivery: each one is either in the price or it is not.
4. The deposit terms. How much, whether it moves to another date, and by when.
5. The notice they need. Ask for a date that is already in their diary, not the earliest they could theoretically manage.
6. Who is actually baking it. One person, or a kitchen with staff? It changes what happens if they are ill.

On the Food Standards Agency's own website, at ratings.food.gov.uk, which lists every food business inspected in the United Kingdom including home bakeries. Search the business name or the town, and the page gives the rating, the date of the inspection and the council that carried it out. A rating of five means hygiene standards were found to be very good at that visit; a business with no entry at all has either never been inspected or is not registered, and both are worth asking about.

What the register will not tell you is how good the cake is — it is a food-safety assessment rather than a review. Treat it the way you would treat an MOT: it is the thing that has to be in order before the rest of the conversation is worth having. Our own rating and the council that gave it are on the about page, with a link to the register entry rather than a badge copied into an image.

Four numbers and one date: the price, what the price includes, the deposit, the balance, and the day the cake is ready. A quote missing any of them is an invitation to a disagreement later, and the commonest version of that disagreement is delivery — quoted separately, mentioned in a later message, and discovered on the invoice.

Lead time belongs in the quote too, and it is the figure most often given optimistically. Ask what the notice is for the kind of cake you want rather than in general: a simple single tier and a tiered cake are different jobs with different diaries, as the table below sets out for this kitchen. If somebody tells you a tiered wedding cake can be made in a few days, that is not good news.

The ones with an uncomfortable honest answer. Can you copy this photograph exactly? — a maker who says yes to a licensed character or another baker's design is telling you something about how they work. What happens if you are ill that week? — a one-person kitchen cannot have a colleague step in, and the honest answer is a refund and your ruined weekend, not a promise. Is this cake safe for my child's nut allergy? — the only good answer names the kitchen's limits rather than soothing you.

Ask them by message rather than on the phone. Not because anyone is dishonest, but because a written answer is one both of you can go back to, and because the quality of a written answer tells you more about how an order will be handled than a friendly conversation does. A maker who writes carefully about allergens will write carefully about your delivery address.

Four, in rough order of how much they should worry you. No entry on the hygiene register and no explanation. A yes to every question, including the ones that should have a qualified answer — a kitchen that can do gluten-free, dairy-free, nut-free and vegan to allergy standard in one domestic oven is describing something that does not exist. Full payment demanded in cash with no written confirmation of what it buys. And a portfolio you can find elsewhere: a reverse image search on two or three photographs takes a minute and occasionally saves a wedding.

None of those is about price. A cheap cake from a careful maker is a good buy and an expensive one from a careless maker is not, and the correlation between the two is weaker than people assume. What you are really choosing is somebody who will tell you no when the answer is no — which is the whole reason this guide was written by a cake maker rather than by a magazine.