With wedding and party season right around the corner, it’s a great time to start considering your catering options for your next event. A Cheese Celebration cake is a perfect alternative to a traditional cake, great for lovers of more savoury treats. Our cheese cakes are the perfect crowd pleaser, designed to be grazed all night. Here are our tops tips to creating and serving the best celebration cake for your event.
1. Please the crowd - ensure there’s a good variety
No matter how big or small your cheese cake is, its important to ensure there’s a good variety of cheeses for everyone at your event. We suggest having at least one soft cheese, one semi soft, and one blue cheese on a cake to ensure there is an assortment of cheese everyone can enjoy.
Its safe to say, everyone likes soft cheese like brie and camembert, so choosing a soft cheese or two (or three) is a great place to start when figuring out your cheese cake. Our Mt Domett double cream brie 1.8kg round is a great base layer as it’s our cheese with the largest diameter – this cheese is smooth and super creamy with a wicked rich flavour. Our Waitaki camembert is creamy with a firmer texture and slightly smaller round, perfect for the mid-layers of a cake. Small soft cheese pairs such as our Lindis pass camembert or Mt Domett 125g rounds also work well at the top of a cake, adding more height and that wow factor to a cheese cake.
Semi-soft cheeses are great as there is a wide variety of them, all with different flavours, textures and all have the same dimensions. Some semi-softs are waxed which adds colour and personality to a cake, and they are great as a mid-layer in any cake. Our most popular semi-softs are Farmhouse, Creamy Havarti and Vintage Five Forks. Explore our website for more of our variety of semi-soft cheeses.
For our blue cheese selection, our Moeraki Bay blue is a great blue for a crowd. It’s mild, creamy, and sits well at the top of a cake on its own or can be beautifully decorated. Windsor blue is the favourite for any blue cheese fan, it has a strong flavour, soft buttery texture and silky-smooth mouth feel. Windsor Blue sits well at the bottom, or second from the bottom layer. Explore our website for our other blue cheese varieties.
2. More is more
When it comes to catering any event, it’s important to ensure there’s enough to go around for your guests, and yourselves!
We have some guidelines to ensure there’s enough for everyone. If you’re going to serve your cheese alongside a traditional dessert such as a cake, we suggest 50-60g per person. However, if you would like the cake to be the star of the show, to be nibbled on throughout the day or night and serve alongside condiments and other nibbles, we suggest about 100g per person.
Even with these guidelines, we do suggest getting more rather than less, especially if you want some for a next-day function or to enjoy yourselves as you wind down from your event.
3. Decorate to reflect your unique style
Cheese cakes are a great canvas to decorate to suit your style, we supply the cheese wrapped so the decorations are completely up to you and/or your caterer. There are endless ways to decorate to reflect your personality and style. Floral decorations are beautiful, especially when matched with a wedding bouquet or floral arrangement, florals can be large and full of colour, or something as subtle as a small lavender bouquet. Decorate with sentimental pieces or decorations to reflect your event. We’ve seen some beautiful “Mr & Mrs” and “Happy Birthday” signs that look great on the top of a cake. The cheese can be styled very simply with ribbon or twine attached to our provided name tags. Finally, why not decorate with food! Seasonal fruit and condiment such as figs, grapes or stone fruit look great with our cheese, and honeycomb works great served on top of the Moeraki bay Blue.
4. Serve with your favourite condiments
Serving a cheese cake with other condiments and snacks creates a real experience around the cheese that you and your guests will love! It’s always great to start with crackers and breads, then build up with cured meats such as salami and prosciutto and condiments such as relishes and hummus. From then on, it’s up to you and your caterer, but we’ve seen some great grazing boards with fresh fruit, nuts, dried fruit, honey, sweets, pretzels, chocolate and more. Pairing our cheese with the right condiments and snacks can make it an experience your guests will never forget.
5. The top cakes from our range
We’ve got some great example cakes in our selection that you can use as they are or as inspiration to create your own cake. Our most popular cakes are the Simply Perfect, The Ultimate and The Moeraki Charmer. The Simply perfect cake is just like its name, simply perfect. This is a great cake for an event with 40-80 people, it has a great variety of our cheeses and looks beautiful on its own. The Ultimate cake is the ideal cake for a big event, a real stand out with 9kg of cheese that comfortably serves 90-140 people. The Moeraki Charmer is more suitable for smaller events, with enough cheese to serve 30-50 people.
Support local artisan cheese makers with a Whitestone Cheese celebration cake. For more information feel free to get in touch at sales@whitestonecheese.co.nz