It primarily depends on the complexity of your order, any dietary considerations or allergies we need to accommodate for your order, and how many other cakes we have for that date. For most events, we prefer 10-14 days of lead time, but can sometimes take very simple cakes with only two or three days of lead time. For weddings or other large events, we prefer a month of lead time. If your event coincides with or is very close to a major holiday or UGA game, please give us as much lead time as possible so that we’ll be more likely to be able to take your order. May, June, September, and October tend to fill up well in advance, so if you’re planning an event in one of those months, it’s worth contacting us months before your event to ensure that we can work with you. Because we have such a high volume of cakes going out during these times our response time is longer, so reaching out in advance means that we have more time to work on details and finalize your order before it becomes critical.

To place an order, please use our contact form on this website, email us at DeborahsSpecialtyCakes@gmail.com, or text or call us at 706.424.4470. Once Emma has responded to you and we have worked through the details, we will take your payment through Zelle, which has no fees, or Venmo or a card, though those do have small fees. We request that you sign our media release form as well. Then we will text you with directions and your appointment time, and your order is confirmed. If we are delivering your order, we will confirm with you that we received your payment, which is the confirmation of your order.

Because we make every cake when the order comes in, we can’t consistently take last-minute orders. Sometimes we can offer you a cake if someone else has canceled their order or if we happen to have baked an extra cake. Typically we can only offer our signature vanilla or chocolate cake for last-minute orders. It never hurts to ask, though, so feel free to send a text or give us a call! When we are able to take a last-minute order, there is a small rush fee, typically $10-$15.

Payment confirms your order, so we require payment in total upfront. The exceptions are wedding cakes and other very large orders; typically those require a non-refundable retainer of half of the estimated total to secure your order, with the remainder due no later than one month prior to the date of your event.

Pricing depends on a variety of factors, including size, flavor, decorations, delivery, etc. Because we tailor each cake to specific client requests, it can be hard to say exactly how much a cake will be before we know those details. Our pricing is also subject to change based on ingredient costs. We try not to adjust our pricing more than once every few years, but we’re a small enough business that we have to be conscious of our ability to pay our employees a reasonable wage. Please use our contact form to request a quote and Emma will be happy to work with you to find a cake that fits your budget and satisfies your tastebuds!

We do! For most of Athens, the fee is $10 for non-wedding cakes, though on the outskirts it may be as high as $20. We calculate our delivery fee for farther destinations based on time and mileage, and are more than happy to let you know what the delivery fee will be if you give us the address where you’d like us to deliver your order.

Emma is our only office staff member and is in the office from 9:30 am to 1:30 pm during the week. She will make every effort to get back to you as soon as possible within those hours. The best way to contact us is via email. We have considered an automated service, but it felt very impersonal and is a little pricey for our small family business. We are very grateful for your understanding and support of our small business.

Absolutely! Our bakery hours are from 9:30 am to 5 pm Monday through Friday, and 9 am to noon on Saturday. We are also happy to deliver wedding orders or other large orders later on Saturdays or Sundays.

We do everything by special order, so there’s no storefront for you to come view cakes or other confections. We have a private commercial kitchen attached to our home which is fully inspected and licensed by the Department of Agriculture. (We are located in a neighborhood, so don’t let that throw you off if you come to pick up an order!) We are more than happy to conduct consultations via email or by phone, or both!

We use fresh ingredients to make our cakes, never box mixes or pre-made frozen cakes. It takes time to bake them, and even more time to let them cool enough for us to decorate them. Additionally, we may have 10 birthday cakes to get out the door on a given day, whereas on baking shows, the baker usually focuses on a single project. We have a single decorator, and she’s terrific, but she’s not a magician or a time traveler, so she can only decorate so many cakes in a given time period. We want to make sure that we’re giving our customers baked goods that we are proud to have made, so we don’t bake and freeze our cakes weeks in advance, and we don’t rush Pam, our decorator, because she’ll get overwhelmed and make mistakes, which isn’t fair to customers who placed their orders further in advance. This is one of the benefits of ordering from a small business but it is also a drawback if you don’t know that you need to order ahead of time.

We do! We are delighted to offer options that are accessible to people with allergies or sensitivities. Please tell us what allergies or dietary considerations you need us to accommodate and we will let you know whether we’re able to create a confection for you! We do want to let you know that the changes in ingredients shift the chemistry of our baked goods, so while it’s fairly simple to make a cake gluten-free or vegan, it is significantly more difficult to make it both gluten-free and vegan. If you have a recipe that has worked for you in the past and would like to share it with us, we would be more than happy to use it to make a confection for you.

It is worth noting that we are not currently taking keto-friendly or sugar-free orders. We’ve tried many sugar replacements and low-carb options, and unfortunately, none of them have been up to our standards. If you have tested a recipe and had good results, we may be able to compare it to recipes we’ve tried and see whether Nico is willing to give it a try.

For our clients who have allergies or other intolerances, we make every effort to limit any risk of cross-contamination. We bake allergen-free cakes in the oven alone, and we decorate them first thing after a thorough extra cleaning of all of our tools and workspaces. If you have a nut allergy or other life-threatening allergy, we can use dedicated nut-free tools as an extra safety measure. Our baker and decorator also wash their hands an extra time and don fresh gloves whenever they’ve stepped away from the allergen-free workspace. Despite all of these efforts, we cannot guarantee that your confection will be completely devoid of any allergens because we are not a dedicated allergen-free bakery.

When you send an email, it gives us a written record of our conversation which we can refer back to if we have questions, and we can easily print photos or other reference materials you may send our way. Furthermore, Emma often checks our email in the evenings if she has a few spare minutes, so you’re more likely to get a response there after hours than by phone.

Yes, please! Even a simple text or email letting us know that you’ve decided not to order from us is greatly appreciated. If you feel comfortable including information about why you’ve decided not to order from us, it’s very helpful for our business to know what motivated your decision. If an order is outside of your budget, we can often suggest alterations or slightly different designs that are within your budget if you let us know what your price point is. But whatever your reasons, we appreciate you letting us know so that we don’t persist in contacting you, wasting both your time and ours.

We recommend taking the cake out of the fridge 1-2 hours before you plan to eat it and letting it come to room temperature in an air-conditioned room before serving. For larger round cakes, we usually include a cutting guide when we give you your cake, but there are plenty of guides online, too!

Yes! We also make cupcakes, cake pops, decorated sugar cookies, old-fashioned cookies, blondies, and brownies. We no longer make pies, sadly, because the cost of making pies completely from scratch simply isn’t reasonable for most clients. We are always open to special requests, too, so if there’s something you’re craving that isn’t listed here, please feel free to ask!

Wedding orders have design time included in the cost of your order, and there is no additional fee for the first two hours of design time. Minor changes to the design are permitted up until a month prior to the wedding date and do not incur additional charges. Major design changes may result in an additional fee of $18 per hour, which is assessed by the half hour.

For non-wedding orders, the first hour of design time is included in the price of your order. After that, there is a $20 fee for the second hour and a half, and each subsequent hour carries a $16 design fee. The fee is assessed by the half-hour, so fifteen minutes will be charged as $8.

We will let you know when the end of your first hour approaches, and you will need to pay a non-refundable retainer to continue the design. If we design a cake for you and you decide not to order from us, that retainer covers the time we spent designing the cake for you. You will be provided with our notes and any mock-ups or photos that pertain to your design, which you may use to place an order with us in the future or with another bakery.

There is, yes. We dedicate extended amounts of time and attention to our wedding orders to ensure that everything is just right for your big day. There is no additional fee for local wedding deliveries, and the cost includes the time it takes to complete an entire cake design. We will also place any flowers or other design elements on the cake at the venue for you for no additional fee.

We limit the number of orders we take on days when we have a wedding order so that we’re able to give wedding cakes the attention they require. This means that we are sometimes turning away other cakes, and while we certainly don’t expect one couple to make up for that lost profit, we do have to ensure that we can pay our employees well and can continue to provide truly yummy gourmet cakes to our customers.

A quick note: ordering dummy cakes or sheet cakes with a small wedding cake is not likely to save you much money because we charge by the serving. Dummy cakes are beastly to decorate, so even though they don’t add to the servings, we have to factor in Pam’s decorating time. If you have a strict budget for your wedding confections, please let Emma know and she’ll work with you to find something that will fit your budget and your taste.

Yes! Our decorator, Pam, is very talented and can craft flowers, animals, plants, and people from fondant and gum paste. Because it has taken her years to hone her skills, we do charge separately for figurines and other design work. We are also happy to offer buttercream flowers, fresh or dried plants or flowers, or we can order figurines, toppers, or other design elements to be placed on your cake. We do not make a profit on flowers, figurines, or other items that we order; we charge you exactly what we pay.

At Deborah’s, we pride ourselves on a top notch product, and appreciate it when clients reach out to let us know if they weren’t pleased with their order.

If you’re requesting a refund on the basis of there being something wrong with your order, please contact us as soon as possible, wrap up the uneaten food, and refrigerate it. That will help us be able to make a determination about what we may have done incorrectly, or might need to start doing differently. We decide on refund requests on a case-by-case basis, and may offer credit toward a future purchase, a partial refund, a total refund, or may decline a refund request, depending on the circumstances. Retainers are non-refundable in any case, but can typically be transferred to another date by request.

Nope. We have no way to guarantee that our product will be up to our standards if we ship it, and it is expensive to ship things quickly and under the appropriate conditions. Not to mention that we’d have to hire new employees to manage the shipping process, and at this point in time, we don’t have enough space to support that kind of operation. It may eventually happen in the future, but it’s not something we’re currently planning.