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Published on January 31, 2018 by · This post may contain affiliate links ·

All About the Cake Tasting

Skill level: Newb

Cake tastings: the all-important meeting between the bride-to-be and yourself.

Cake tastings can often feel stressful, vague, and out of your control. How do you setup the table? What types of cake flavors should you offer? How do you close the deal and get a down-payment?

Liz Marek and her friends conduct a mock-tasting and show how a typical meeting would go, ways to run the meeting and remain in control, how to deal with off-topic ideas from the difficult mother-in-law, and how to get a down-payment on site.

42:33 Minutes of Instruction

What You Will Learn

  • How to setup your tasting to impress
  • Learn how to direct guide the bride through decisions and add-ons
  • How to deal with off-topic cake ideas and difficult party members
  • How to get a down-payment right away and book clients

Tutorial Chapters

  1. Table setup 1:50
  2. Fondant samples 3:19
  3. Tasting ambiance 3:58
  4. Palette Cleansers 6:53
  5. Cake Portfolio 7:19
  6. Being prepared 8:25
  7. Tasting introductions 10:18
  8. Taking good notes 11:03
  9. Delivery charges 11:43
  10. Wedding colors 13:04
  11. Picking the cake tiers 13:55
  12. Quick cake sketch 14:53
  13. How to handle off-topic ideas 17:41
  14. Rough estimate and cake add-ons 21:04
  15. Tasting the cake flavors 26:53
  16. Closing the sale 33:58
  17. When to refine the cake sketch 38:15
  18. Handling cancellations 41:05

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About Liz Marek

Liz Marek is a professional cake artist and recipe developer who has been teaching baking and cake decorating since 2008. She founded Artisan Cake Company in Portland, Oregon in 2009 and now runs Sugar Geek Show, where she publishes kitchen-tested recipes, food science explanations, and step-by-step tutorials.

Liz is best known for sculpted and hyperrealistic cakes. She won Netflix's Is It Cake? Holiday 2 in 2025 with a hyperrealistic Santa cake, and has competed on and won Food Network cake competitions. Cake Masters Magazine named her one of the top 10 cake artists in 2017. She is the author of Artisan Cake Company's Visual Guide to Cake Decorating and a graduate of the Oregon Culinary Institute.

Her focus is on explaining not just how a recipe works but why it works, so bakers can troubleshoot instead of guess. Every recipe on this site is tested before it's published.

Liz teaches full-length cake tutorials, including sculpted and hyperrealistic cakes, at Sugar Geek University.