If you are a beginner and want to grow just a few mushrooms, then cakes are better for you since the whole process is shorter and bears less chances of failure.
Growing cakes is a testing grounds for your skills. If you can´t get
PF cakes to colonize clean, then you will almost certainly fail at casing
grain based substrates.
Once you have managed to grow cakes and got a feel for it you can advance to better yielding methods.
