Which Cake Flavour Should You Choose?

By picking the cake with the fewest objectors rather than the one with the most enthusiasts. For a mixed room that means a light sponge with a sharp fruit filling: nobody refuses it, children eat it, and the people who find cake too sweet finish their slice.

Chocolate is the other safe answer and it behaves differently — it has stronger supporters and a few firm refusers, and it goes faster at a party than anything else. If the room is mostly adults and the cake is the end of a meal, chocolate. If it is mixed, or if it is a long afternoon, fruit.

The flavours that lose a room are the strongly scented ones. Coffee, rose and anything spiced are ordered by people who love them, for people who love them. They are the wrong gamble for a crowd you have never met.

Yes, and most people choose the other way round. The sponge is the background: its job is texture and a mild flavour that carries. The filling is what the mouthful tastes of, and it is also the only lever that controls sweetness.

That is why a sharp fruit filling — sour cherry, raspberry, lemon — is the usual answer to "not too sweet". It does not reduce the sugar; it puts acid against it, and the palate reads the contrast rather than the quantity. The same sponge under the same buttercream tastes markedly less sweet with fruit in the middle than with caramel.

So decide the filling first, then pick the sponge that stays out of its way.

The ones that still taste right at room temperature after an hour on a table. A cake for two is eaten when it is cut; a cake for a crowd stands around, is cut by somebody who is not a baker, and is eaten over the following hour or two.

• Good for a crowd: vanilla with fruit, chocolate with caramel, lemon with raspberry. Familiar, robust, no surprises.
• Better for a few: pistachio, coffee, anything floral or spiced. Strong flavours that reward people who chose them.
• Risky for either: a flavour picked because it sounded impressive. The cake nobody finishes is the expensive one.

For a mixed crowd, two flavours is the honest compromise, and it is free: a tiered cake can be a different flavour per tier, and cupcakes are baked in batches anyway.

Buttercream softens before anything else does, so the real question is what is holding the cake together. A fruit filling and a buttercream coat are fine for an afternoon in a cool room and visibly unhappy in a marquee in July. Ganache holds its shape longer than buttercream because it is chocolate and cream set firm rather than whipped fat and sugar.

Fresh fruit on the outside is beautiful and has a clock on it: berries weep after a few hours in the warm, and the colour runs into pale buttercream. For a long hot day, put the fruit inside and finish the outside with ganache or a textured buttercream in a colour that will not show a stain.

Three lines, and the answer comes back the same day. What they like in general terms — fruity, chocolatey, not too sweet. Whether the cake has to stand around before it is eaten. And any allergy in the room, which narrows the list faster than any preference does.

What not to send is a list of six flavours to choose between: a baker who knows what you are after will suggest something better than a shortlist assembled from a website. Prices do not change with the flavour — a cake is £100 whichever sponge is inside it — so there is nothing to optimise but the taste.