The question nobody asks early enough
Most enquiries open with a cake, because a cake is what you picture. It is worth a moment on the question underneath it: is there a moment in this event where something gets cut?
If there is — a speech, a candle, a photograph everybody is waiting for — you want a cake, and the design should be built around that moment.
If there is not, a cake can quietly work against you. It needs a table, a knife, somebody willing to cut it, and plates. At a standing event, or one where people arrive across two hours, it often ends up half-cut and awkward while the thing people actually wanted was something they could hold.
What I make at this scale
Cupcake sets, macarons, and full styled dessert tables — matched to the palette of your day rather than assembled from whatever was available. The same hand and the same kitchen as the tiered work; the format is the only thing that changes.
Cupcake sets
Right when everyone needs their own, when the event is moving between rooms, or when there is no surface to put a cake on. They are also the easiest format to make genuinely personal across a group — a palette, a repeated detail, one or two that are different for the person it is actually about.
Macarons
Right when you want the table to look considered rather than abundant. They sit well alongside a small cake, which is a combination I suggest often: something to cut, and something to graze.
A styled dessert table
Right for a room where people arrive across an evening. It is designed as a whole — heights, palette, how it reads from across the room — rather than as a collection of individually good things pushed together, which is what most dessert tables actually are.
Smaller does not mean faster
This is the one expectation worth resetting. Cupcake sets and dessert tables need about two weeks’ notice — the same as tiered work.
It surprises people, and the reason is straightforward: forty hand-finished cupcakes are forty hand-finished objects. A tiered cake is one object. The five-day minimum that applies to a simpler celebration cake does not apply here, and a large set at short notice is usually the thing I have to turn down.
If you are planning around a date, treat small formats as the same booking problem as a cake, not an easier one.
A smaller commission is a real commission
There is a version of this studio that would treat a cupcake order as a lesser thing. I would rather be plain: a smaller format gets the same conversation, the same colour matching by hand, and the same delivery by me.
It is also, quite often, how a longer relationship starts. A set of cupcakes for an office in March becomes a birthday cake in July. That is not a sales funnel; it is just what happens when somebody finds out the thing was actually made by a person.
Delivery, and the thing worth repeating
Everything is delivered. There is no shop, nothing sits on a shelf, and nothing is collected — I bring it to you across Toronto and the GTA and set it up where it is being served. Delivery is included within Toronto and quoted beyond it.
For a dessert table that set-up is not a formality. The arrangement is most of the work, and it is the reason the table looks like one thing rather than several.
What to tell me
- The date, and whether the event is seated or standing. That one word changes the recommendation more than anything else.
- Numbers. Rough is fine.
- Whether there is a moment — a speech, a cutting, a photograph. If there is, we should talk about a small cake alongside.
- A palette, or anything you have saved.
If a cake turns out to be the better answer after all, I will say so. The point is to get the format right before the design starts, because the format is the part that is awkward to change later.
The celebrations page covers birthdays, showers and milestones, and the corporate page covers dessert tables for larger rooms. Either way, the form below is the quickest way to a firm answer.