Anyone laying out a dessert table in a hall at four o'clock on a Saturday tends to begin by putting everything flat, tray after tray in a tidy line along the trestle, and only on stepping back do they see that forty people are about to file past something resembling a school fair, while the friend who came to help has already slid an upturned crate under the cloth and lifted the white cake onto it. Most dessert table decor ideas come down to that one move, because a spread built with some care needs very little on it besides the food.
Give the table a middle
A table reads from the centre outward, so the first decision is the tallest object, and a four-layer cake does that job on its own. Our Snow White Chocolate Cake is vanilla sponge under white chocolate ganache, covered in hand-made white chocolate petals that snap against the cream, and at 20cm ($120, serving 20 to 25) it can carry a dark cloth with nothing around it. All ten four-layer flavours in our layer cake collection start from $95, and our guide to cakes in Christchurch shows every other format.
Set that cake on a stand or a crate, then bring in a second level with a bundt, because the ring breaks up the straight lines of the trays. A 25cm Marble Chocolate Cake ($55, serving 16) shows dark and milk chocolate swirled through each other at the cut, and like everything in our Tea Cakes & Loaves range it sits happily on the bench until everyone arrives. Keep the lowest things at the front edge, where a hand can reach them without crossing the cake.
Take your colour from the ingredients
We don't use fondant or colourings, and we don't make custom cakes or decorations, so the palette comes from what's already on the menu, and every colour on the table ends up tasting of something. Green can come from the pistachio ganache in the Emerald petit four, and pink from the raspberry ganache on a Pink Lemonade Mini Cake, with sharp lemon sponge underneath. The Passion Mini Cake brings dark ganache and edible flowers, its passionfruit acid cutting straight through the cocoa, while the Tronco petit four is shaped like a small log under edible moss, with hazelnut crumble that clicks under the teeth.
Pick two colours and one dark anchor and run them in blocks, so the eye travels from pink through white to chocolate. Twelve of one mini cake in a tight row photographs far better than twelve different things, and our mini cakes and petit fours suit that, with mini cakes in trays of 6 ($48) or 12 ($84) and petit fours at $60 for a tray of 15. The sums on pieces per guest are in our grazing table and petit four ideas, and our catering boxes in Christchurch show what comes ready to lift out and arrange.
Lay it out for the hand reaching in
Leave a thumb's width between pieces, and stack plates at one end so the queue moves past the cake one way. A rank of brigadeiro at $2 each, condensed milk and chocolate cooked down until fudgy, fills any gap at the front, and no birthday party in Brazil goes without them, as you'll see from what a Brazilian birthday table looks like.
Write a small card for each item and name the nuts, since the Tronco carries hazelnut and the Emerald pistachio. All ten petit fours are made with no added gluten, as are the mini lemon tart ($14) and the pudim ($10), a baked custard with a bitter edge to its dark caramel, so guests avoiding gluten can have a board of their own. Our kitchen is small and without exclusive production areas for all of our different recipes, so traces may occur, and we can't guarantee anything is safe for severe coeliac disease.
Choose it with whoever's helping on the day
This layout suits birthday cakes in Christchurch as readily as wedding desserts in Christchurch, and the best planning happens at a table at The Welder with the person who'll be lifting the other end of the crate. Buy a couple of slices from the cabinet and put a photo of the venue between you, then argue over colour while the palette knives scrape in the open kitchen, because two people tasting will settle in twenty minutes what one person can't settle in a week of scrolling. By the second flat white someone has drawn the table on a napkin with a circle in the middle, and a fork is scraping up the last of the ganache.
From our kitchen to your trestle
Most of our range needs two days' notice and petit fours need seven, and the checkout date picker only offers dates the kitchen can meet for your cart, so you collect at the pickup time you choose there. We don't deliver or set up tables: everything is collected from our patisserie inside The Welder, 20–26 Welles Street. Collect the day before, when cakes come assembled in their box and keep in the fridge overnight in our packaging, bring them out one to two hours before serving, and read how to transport a cake before you load the car. We're open 10am to 9pm Tuesday to Saturday, closed Sunday and Monday.
