A logo on a cake is not a print job
There is a way of putting a logo on a cake that involves printing it onto an edible sheet and laying it on the surface. It is fast, it is cheap, and it looks exactly like what it is: a photograph of your brand sitting on top of a dessert.
I do not work that way. A logo here is hand-piped or cut from sugar paste, colours matched by hand. It takes longer and it costs more, and it is the difference between a cake with your brand on it and a cake that looks like your brand.
That choice has a consequence, though, and it is worth understanding before you send the file.
What survives at cake scale, and what does not
Sugar is not a printer. It has a resolution, and that resolution is somewhere around the width of a piping nozzle. Everything below that has to be interpreted rather than reproduced.
In practice, the things that tend to need simplifying are these:
- Hairline strokes and fine serifs. A logotype that is elegant at business-card size can disappear or blur at cake size, because the line is thinner than the medium can hold.
- Gradients and soft shadows. Sugar paste is opaque and flat. A gradient becomes a decision: which of the two colours do you actually want?
- Small type. A tagline under a mark is often the first thing to go. It is almost always better to lose it cleanly than to pipe something illegible.
- Very tight colour matching across many colours. Two or three matched well looks deliberate. Seven matched approximately looks like a mistake.
None of this means your logo will not work. Most do. It means the version that goes on the cake may be a slightly simplified version, and you should see that and agree to it before it is piped rather than discover it on the day.
Send artwork as early as you can — a vector file or a clean PNG is easiest. If something is not going to read well in sugar, you will hear that from me at the quote stage, not after.
How much notice branded work needs
About two weeks for most corporate orders. Longer for anything with a logo or branded detail, because that work is drawn and tested before it is piped — the test is the point, and it is what stops a surprise.
The holiday season is the exception, and it is a large one. December books from September. If you are reading this in late October and planning a December party, ask now rather than after the next planning meeting. I take a handful of orders a week, and the date is held when the deposit is paid, not when we first speak.
Cake, table, or something for everyone to hold
Three formats cover almost every office brief, and they are not interchangeable.
A single branded cake
Right when there is a moment — a launch, an anniversary, a send-off. Something gets cut, somebody says a few words, and there is a photograph. The cake is the object in that photograph, which is why the logo work matters.
A dessert table
Right for a room of a hundred with no single moment. People graze across an evening. It photographs as a spread rather than an object, and it is styled to a palette rather than built around a mark.
Cupcake sets and macarons
Right when everyone needs to hold their own, or when the thing is moving between floors and there is no table. Matched to a brand palette rather than to whatever was in the chiller that morning.
Tell me the occasion and the numbers, and I will tell you which of the three I would actually choose. Often it is not the one in the original brief.
Dietary requirements, answered plainly
Nut-free and eggless are both possible. Tell me on the form and I will confirm what I can do for your numbers.
What I will not do is let you assume more than is true: my kitchen is not a certified allergen-free facility. For an office order, where you may genuinely not know everyone’s requirements, that distinction matters and you should have it up front rather than discover it when somebody asks.
Invoicing, and the part finance teams care about
Corporate orders are invoiced rather than handled informally. A PO number or a supplier onboarding form is no problem. Thirty per cent holds the date and the balance is due the week of the event.
You get a firm price before you commit — not a range that firms up later into something larger.
What I am the wrong studio for
Volume. CakeHub is one person baking to order in one kitchen and delivering everything personally. If you need two hundred identical boxes by Thursday, I am not the right answer and I will tell you so in the first reply rather than take the order and disappoint you.
What you get instead is one person who takes the brief, bakes it, drives it and sets it up. Not a dispatcher and a stranger with a van. The things that usually go wrong with corporate catering are logistical — it arrives late, it arrives at the wrong door, nobody can eat it, it looks like it came from a supermarket chiller. Those are the parts I control directly, because there is nobody else to control them.
The corporate page sets out lead times, invoicing and what I take on. If December matters to you, the useful move is to ask now and settle the design later — the date is what runs out.