As I said, our business is personal because we are real humans interacting like humans. This level of trust and loyalty simply cannot be built when you’re constantly using new drivers or faceless courier services with no accountability. Our regular drivers have years of experience handling fragile celebration cakes and are able to advise recipients in person on how to carry and store them safely at the door.

They also know that if there is ever an incident or delay, all they have to do is communicate with us and we work through it together to solve it quickly and sensibly.

Driver unwell? We have trusted backup drivers who can step in. Driver’s car suddenly out of action? He lets us know and we hire or buy another vehicle. Driver has a road incident and a cake is damaged? More on that later…keep reading.

4. Dowelling Tiered-Cakes

Once upon a time, Brides magazine wanted to feature one of our five-tiered wedding cakes in their Best Wedding Cakes feature. My team created a gorgeous cake weighing over 15kg. But they forgot to dowel it. For those who don’t know, dowels are wooden or plastic sticks inserted vertically into the cakes to provide structure. The next day, when I went to the bakery to collect the cake, I saw the tiers slowly sinking into each other, turning it into the leaning cake tower of Pisa. It was far too late to make another cake, as we were due at the photo shoot in two hours.

We boxed it up, put it in the boot and hoped and prayed it would arrive in one piece so I could do some last-minute magic. Unfortunately, we hit a road bump, the cake slid, tilted forward and went full-on SMASH. I still showed up at the shoot with my very sad face and the ruined cake, just so the editors knew what had happened. Even my competitors couldn’t hide their pity. And no, the cake did not make it into the feature. Lesson learnt: ALWAYS DOWEL TALL CAKES.

Some bakeries drill holes through each cake board and run one mega-long central dowel through the whole cake. We don’t, because our super soft sponge cakes behave better with dowels trimmed for each tier. This gives the support needed so the top tiers don’t sink into the ones below and, if there is an accident, the damage is minimised. There’s no single central dowel ripping through the entire cake, and the sponges are usually salvageable. You’re able to separate the damaged tiers, fix them, and put everything back together.

On two rare occasions, our drivers have had unfortunate accidents on the road. Our first instinct has always been to make sure the driver is absolutely fine. Once that’s established, the cakes come back to me and I carefully reconstruct the damaged tiers, touch up the decoration and send them back out, good as new – if not even better. It’s one of the reasons our tiered wedding cakes have such a strong reputation for arriving in one piece.

You can see my tutorial on how we stack our wedding cakes here if you’d like a peek behind the scenes.

5. Chill Cakes Before Delivery

Room temperature cakes DO NOT TRAVEL WELL. I’ve seen enough bashed supermarket cakes on shelves to know even the giants can’t cheat physics. Buttercream is made from butter. Butter, when warm or even ambient, is SOFT. Soft buttercream will smudge, slide and melt at the slightest poke, prod, shake or jolt.

To make sure our cakes are delivered in perfect condition, they have to be made and stored properly first. Our hero sponge and Swiss meringue buttercream cakes keep extremely well in cool storage (fondant-covered cakes…not so much, but we don’t do those here anyway). It’s the same whether it’s a simple birthday bake or a towering celebration cake.

During the winter months, we store fully decorated and boxed cakes in the fridge the night before delivery, and our driver moves them straight into his temperature-controlled vehicle in the morning, making sure the internal temperature doesn’t creep over 22 degrees Celsius.

In the summer months, we get a bit more tactical. Cakes going out first in our optimised route are kept in the fridge, and the ones scheduled for later in the afternoon are stored in the freezer. That way they have time to thaw gently along their journey and arrive in perfect condition by the time they reach the recipient (and yes, we have plenty of “learning curve” receipts for this system).

By changing how cakes are stored according to the season, and controlling the vehicle temperature, we make sure they arrive at ambient or almost-ambient temperature, neat, glossy and ready to be sliced.

6. Non-Rigid Packaging

Rigid packaging might look smarter and give the impression of being safer against tiny smudges, but if there is a real accident, the damage is actually LESS when the packaging isn’t rigid. Think about being pushed against a brick wall versus falling into a football goal net. You’d risk greater injury against the wall. The same logic applies to fragile cakes. Our fully recyclable cake boxes flex and cushion the blow, whereas the impact on a cake in a rigid box would be much harsher.

7. Optimised Delivery Routes

Our cakes are delivered between 09:00 and 17:00. As a small business with one dedicated driver and one equally dedicated vehicle, we can’t generally offer timed delivery slots — but what we can do is make sure every cake reaches its destination safely, efficiently and with a personal touch. This sits alongside our main London cake delivery information, which covers the service itself, while this section is all about the “how”.

Once all orders are finalised, our AI-assisted route planning system automatically generates the most efficient delivery route for the day. It analyses traffic patterns, expected road conditions, distance between stops and even seasonal quirks (London in December, anyone?) to create the smoothest possible journey for both driver and cake.

The best bit? The system emails each customer directly with their ETA — no guesswork, no vague time windows, no endlessly refreshing tracking pages. It’s smart, incredibly time-efficient, and still wonderfully personal, because it’s built around our delivery style and our driver rather than a faceless courier network.

If anything changes on the day — a delay, a diversion, a customer who suddenly realises they won’t be home — the driver and recipient can get in touch directly. Human-to-human, just as it should be when someone is waiting for a cake that actually matters.

8. Handling and Storage Labels

We can mitigate almost every issue while the cake is with us, but what happens after delivery is largely out of our control. That doesn’t mean we give up. Our labels are custom designed to include allergen information as well as handling notes (it’s cake, not concrete – FRAGILE. DO NOT PRESS DOWN ON THE LID. DO NOT GRAB FROM THE SIDES), plus storage and consumption guidelines. Cakes can be stored in the fridge, but they must ALWAYS be eaten at room temperature. Cold cake is dry cake, and nothing is more depressing than chewing your way through a fridged slice.

If you ever misplace the label or forget what it said, you can also double-check our general guidance on the cake information page.

9. Being ‘On Call’

Once the cakes are out for delivery, we don’t mentally tick them off and consider them someone else’s problem. Our email inbox is monitored, and our driver knows he can reach us quickly for any emergencies. Even basic bish queries like “How do I store the cake?” get a reply, where I’ll paste the relevant section from our FAQs and remind them that storage and serving guidelines are printed on the box too. People are busy; they don’t always read labels, and I really don’t want anyone eating cold cake if I can help it.

10. 100% Money Back Guarantee

We guarantee that if a cake has been delivered and the customer is unhappy on delivery for any reason and wants to reject it, our driver will take the cake straight back for a full refund. Yes, even “fussy” customers who thought pink was red, like Claire’s mum.

My own personal pride can’t handle anyone not loving our work, so if they don’t like it, I don’t want their money. It’s important to be clear that this guarantee is only for cakes at the point of delivery – we can’t accept responsibility for what happens afterwards, which any rational person would accept (probably not Claire’s mum though).

It’s not rocket science, is it? And yet so many businesses, big and small, still manage to get this wrong. If you see your delivery drivers as a means to an end and your customers as one-time wallets, that will always be reflected in your service. Ultimately, it’s not just about cake; it’s about caring for people at both ends of the journey. The cake, of course, is amazing – but we also care deeply about our drivers and our customers.

Love,
Reshmi xoxo

And if you’d like that level of care behind your next celebration, you can always choose from our hand-finished customer favourite cakes, baked to order and sent out on the road with as much attention as the party they’re heading to.