How Much Do Cupcakes Cost?

Each cupcake is £6, and the boxes are half a dozen, a dozen and two dozen — the larger the box, the less each cake works out at, as the table below shows. Nothing is sold as a single cupcake, for a practical reason rather than a commercial one: one cake uses the same batch of batter, the same cream and the same hour as six, so a single would have to be priced at something nobody would pay.

What the price covers is the cake, the cream and a simple finish. Toppers, edible printing and gold leaf are priced per cupcake rather than per box, which keeps a mixed box honest — a dozen with printed logos on half of them is charged for six prints, not twelve.

One each, and then a few more. A cupcake is a portion in a way a slice of cake is not: nobody cuts it, nobody serves it, and it either gets eaten or it goes home in a napkin, so you can count heads and stop. The few more are for the people who have a second, which at a children's party is most of them and at an office leaving-do is nobody.

Where cupcakes get over-ordered is when they sit beside a cake. Then they are not the dessert, they are the thing people pick up on the way past, and two thirds of the head count is plenty. Where they get under-ordered is a buffet with no cake at all: with nothing to cut, the cupcakes are the only sweet thing on the table and they go faster than anyone expects.

Because a flavour is a batch. Each sponge is mixed, baked and creamed as a tray rather than as individual cakes, so half a dozen of a flavour is the smallest amount that can be made without throwing most of a batch away — which is why the minimum is half a dozen per flavour rather than per box.

In practice that shapes the order rather than restricting it. A dozen can be two flavours, two dozen can be four, and a box of half a dozen is one. If what you want is one of everything, the honest answer is that it costs more than the same number of cupcakes in two flavours, and the reply to your enquiry will say so rather than quietly charging for it.

Per person they are close, and which way it falls depends on how the cake is cut. A cake is cheaper per slice than a cupcake is per cake — but only if somebody gets the full number of portions out of it, and most hosts do not. Cut generously, a cake gives fewer, larger slices and the cost per person rises above the cupcake price without anybody noticing.

What cupcakes really save is the serving. No knife, no plates, no forks, no queue and no washing up, which at a party of thirty is worth more than the few pounds either way. What they cost you is the moment: there is nothing to put candles in and nothing to cut, which is why the common answer is a small cake to sing at with cupcakes beside it.

The recipe is the same family and the finish is not. A cupcake is the same sponge and the same buttercream as a full cake, baked in a case and piped rather than layered and covered, so the flavour you like in a cake is available as a cupcake. What a cupcake cannot have is filling between layers, which is where a good deal of a cake's character lives — a cupcake is sponge and cream, where a cake is sponge, filling, sponge, cream.

That is also why a cupcake keeps less well than a cake. There is more surface and less cake, the cream is exposed on top rather than sealed between layers, and they are at their best on the day. A cake will be good for two days; cupcakes should be ordered for the day they are eaten.