Do you make birthday cakes for your family or do you purchase them from the store or the bakery? If you make them, do you make homemade from scratch or use a mix? Do you decorate them yourself? If you buy cakes from the store or the bakery, do you custom order or just pick something up? I typically make our birthday cakes and treats for other special occasions. I let the birthday girl or boy choose the flavor.
Personally I prefer to bake my birthday cakes from scratch rather than using mix, and like to do the topping or icing just the same way, but I must admit that sometime I don't have the time to go for the how process from the batter to decorate it. So when time is a major concern, my second option is still baking the cake but with the aid of prepared mix and commercial toppings and else. The very last choice would be get it from the bakery because there is none I can make a choice from. I mean, there are tons of bakeries, but my taste memory is associate to the taste of cakes that my dad used to buy for us when mom was unable to bake them. Those cakes were so delicious and as an adult, I have not found any bakery that can replicate such taste. The original bakery those cakes came from closed more than 20 years ago and had no branches. Only exception to the above would be the Collin Street Bakery at Corsicana, Texas. I bought a fruit cake when this bakery was celebrating 100 years and it was not only delivered in a commemorative keepsake tin beautifully decorated, but it was so delicious that I usually order a cake every Christmas since.
I like to bake my own cakes. A box mix is under $2 and you can make a cake and frost it with powdered sugar. It can cost me $4 to make a cake instead of paying $20 to buy a pre-made one in the market bakery.
When I was growing up I had bakery birthday cakes. Then as I got older it was always store bought. Both are delicious! Now that I'm older it's sugar free only preferably chocolate.
In my family it was usually store-bought cakes. Though later on we’d splurge a bit more and get ice cream cakes from Baskin Robbins… that has sometimes ended in disaster (read: my father, to this day, has NO idea of my mother’s tastes, so he’ll buy her a strawberry ice cream cake despite the fact that my mom has always hated anything strawberry flavored). These days I usually just get myself a piece or two of something super fancy from my favorite restaurant, like a ganache torte or lilikoi cheesecake. I’m not much of a birthday person, but I do like the treats.
II tend to make birthday cakes, but there is a market here that sells the most adorable birthday cakes I have ever seen. They are small, perfect for our small family, and only cost 5.95. The next time there is a birthday in the family I am going to get one of those cakes.
I always get them from the bakery at the store, but this year it actually crossed my mind to make some cupcakes from home or a cake. I went ahead and got a store bought one, but I really should try. I just don't want to mess it up.
We don't try to have custom made cakes for birthdays, they are just bought as is, like those cake rolls. They are cheap too, around $7 to $8 only. The premium flavors tend to be more expensive.
With a few exceptions, I am more of a pie person but the last time I had a storebought cake it was horrid. It was my birthday, courtesy of my evil ex-coworkers and Stevie wonder could see the icicles on the frosting. The irony was that as I was leaving that dept., someone bought the best red velvet cake I've had to this day. I would have been happier with Sarah Lee pound cake.
I usually bake them myself. I can't bake much more than cheesecake, but thankfully everyone says it's the best cheesecake they have ever tasted.
If I am throwing a large birthday party for someone with many guests, I will go with a store bought cake which has been professionally decorated. I don't have the equipment nor the steady hand and skills to decorate cakes like that. Besides, even if you buy a boxed cake mix and a jar of frosting, it's not going to taste much different from a store bought cake, since it's all processed ingredients anyhow. I almost never attempt to make cakes completely from scratch, since I never have cake flour on hand and all purpose flower doesn't work well for cakes at all - they come out far too dense and heavy. If the persons birthday or other celebration was a more intimate, smaller gathering of people, then I would possibly bake the cake myself (using a cake mix from the store) and frost and decorate it myself, but I would keep it simple and elegant. I can handle a small cake, but I don't have the equipment and baking pans to be doing large sheet cakes.
Usually homemade from scratch, although if I'm back home, there's one bakery that I will buy cakes from, because those are what we often had growing up, and they're the best in the world, besides my mom's, of course. I love lard frosting, and prefer my cakes to have that. I'm inevitably disappointed when someone buys me a cake and it has the whipped cream frosting, because I just don't care for the taste of that. My family is a bunch of chocoholics, and they like one cake in particular from our favorite bakery, so if it's one of their birthdays and I'm up there, I'll buy that for them.
Being honest, I don't really have the greatest talent for baking, so as a result of this it isn't something that I try to do all that often. It is much safer for me to buy it from a shop than to make it myself, because if I was to do it I would have to try it so many times that I don't think it would actually work out as any cheaper anyway. But if you're good at baking then I can see that shop bought cake would be more expensive, so it is much better to bake it yourself if you can.
I think you should go for it. Try a cake mix first. You can grab one when they go on sale cheap, and then give it a try. Baking a "real" cake really isn't much harder than that. You just have to take care with the measurements and follow the directions. That was my biggest downfall when I first tried. I was bad about ignoring the directions and just dumping everything in. The order of ingredients and such is important, as is preheating the oven.
I wish I could bake well enough to make my kids' birthday cakes. I always buy one. Sometimes we do ice cream cakes which are always a hit with the kids. I've tried many different bakeries in the city I live in and haven't found one that I really like. Sometimes you pay an exorbitant amount of money and the cake is dry and icing too sweet. We usually buy a theme cake so we pay extra for the superheroes on top. One year we went with fancy cupcakes from a tiny bakery but that too was so expensive for what you got. Each cupcake was over $4 and when you are buying for 10 people that's a lot of money for not a lot of cake. So like I said i wish I could bake my kids cakes. I should looking to taking a cake making class, it would be money well spent.
When it comes to any cake, regardless of occasion, I think the mix boxes at Walmart are awesome. They definitely have a great flavor and they last a long time too. When I bought an already made store bought cake, they taste almost stale most of the time. I still eat it because, hey, it's cake, but I shouldn't. I really like the bakery cakes as well. You just pick it up when it's finished and they taste fresh. They have an even better flavor than the mix boxes you can make on your own.
Ovens aren't a big thing here so practically no one bakes at home, including me. All I have is a toaster oven and that's only good for reheating. I'm not sure I'd still try and bake a cake if I did have an oven though but I'm sure once I get to try it once I'll probably be doing it over and over, especially if it turns out that I have some skill for it. I doubt I'd be able to copy my favorite cakes though so for those I'll probably just keep buying them from the special bakers I like, but for ordinary cakes I think I'll be willing to give it a try if I had the chance.
I usually just buy from the store because it is more convenient and easy to do this, especially when the party date is near. I just pick up any cake that looks delicious and buy it. But if I have the time, I also make cakes using a ready mix product that can be bought in supermarkets. Homemade feels like the cake is more special because it is especially made by you and the celebrant can really appreciate it. I am not much of an artist so I just decorate the homemade cake in a simple way. I use butter cream and decorate the cake all around with simple cake designs. It is nice that you make the cakes yourself and let the celebrant choose the flavor. I am sure they always appreciate your efforts.
