How Much Cake for a Hundred Guests?

Four of the largest single tier, or two of them beside several dozen cupcakes. The table below gives what each size cuts, and the arithmetic from there is simple: the largest round cake here feeds between twenty and thirty people depending on how generously it is cut, so a hundred guests is four of them if everybody eats and three if the room is honest about itself.

Two things make that number move. A sit-down lunch where cake is dessert needs a full slice for every place setting; an evening party with a buffet needs rather less, because people who have just eaten take a sliver or nothing at all. If the cake is being handed out rather than plated, it goes further still — a slice cut in half on a napkin satisfies most guests at ten o'clock at night.

Per head it is close, and the difference is in the labour rather than the ingredients. Cupcakes cost £6 each and a hundred of them is a hundred portions with no guesswork, no knife and no queue; a round cake costs less per slice but needs somebody to cut it, plates to put it on and a person who knows how to get thirty slices out of it rather than eighteen. The table below has the boxes and what each one costs.

The practical answer at a hundred guests is usually both. One cake to cut and photograph, cupcakes beside it for the people who would rather help themselves. That combination costs less than enough cake for everyone, serves faster than a single large cake, and leaves you with something to cut at the moment when a cut is expected.

Because a guest list is not an appetite list. At almost any party a proportion of the room does not eat cake at all — the people driving, the ones who have eaten, the children who want the icing and abandon the sponge, the guests who left before it was cut. Caterers plan for most of a room rather than all of it, and the number that works in practice is nearer two in three than one for one.

The exception is a sit-down meal where cake is the dessert on the menu. Then every place setting needs a portion, nobody is driving past the table and the slices have to be the same size, because they are being plated rather than handed round. If that is your event, count the chairs instead of the invitations and do not round down.

Several, nearly always, and not for the reason people expect. A single cake big enough for a hundred guests would have to be tiered, and tiers are priced for the engineering as much as the cake — dowels, boards, a stacked structure built on site. Two or three separate cakes of the largest round size give you the same number of portions, two or three flavours instead of one, and no structural work at all.

Where a tiered cake earns its price is when it has to be the centrepiece of the room: a wedding, a fiftieth, anything with speeches. Then one tall cake beats three flat ones on sight, and the extra cost buys the look rather than the portions. Cut the cake for the photograph and serve from a second cake in the kitchen — caterers have done this for decades and no guest has ever noticed.

Earlier than for a family birthday, because a large order is several cakes rather than one and they all have to be finished in the same two days. The ordinary notice here is 7–10 days, or at least 14 for two tiers; a rush costs 50% of the price when the notice is under 7 days, and on a large order a rush is the request most likely to be refused outright rather than surcharged, simply because the oven time does not exist.

Delivery is worth thinking about at the same time. Several cakes and a few boxes of cupcakes will not fit in a car with the passengers, and they should not travel stacked. Delivery is quoted by distance from £30, and for a party of this size it is usually the difference between arriving with cake and arriving with a story about cake.