For those of you who make your living on cakes, do you make sure you get paid so much per hour of your time? I know a lot of variables go into pricing a cake (and I don't pretend to understand all of them) but I've never heard this one mentioned. If you do...and if it's not too intrusive...how much do you make per hour?

At this point I mostly make cakes for family and friends but more "outsiders" are asking me to do them. It just seems like a fair price for a cake leaves me with very little money for my time.

I have been making cakes for friends and family for a few years now, and almost never make any profit off of them. Nobody wants to pay what I'd need to charge in order to make a profit, for a cake that they can get at the grocery store for $30 (I'd probably charge double or triple!)

I've decided to stick to wedding cakes from now on. Those are the ones I really make a profit at since most people are expecting to pay at least $200 for a wedding cake. I have four to do this summer and I charged between $190-$365 for all of them - none of the brides blinked an eye at the price - whereas when I quote $70 for a kids birthday cake, I don't usually get a call back.

What I do is charge a base price depending on how many people will be at the wedding (and whether or not the cake is being served as the dessert). It's usually around $100-$150 (most weddings in my tiny town are small). Then I charge $15 per layer, which just covers the ingredients and a little more. So, since I spend about 10 hours on a wedding cake, I make roughly $12/hr (going off the "base price").

This way of pricing works well for me and I've actually been making a profit off my cakes for once in FOREVER!

before even selling the first crumb to the public, you have to set down and figure out your price of supplies, and how much you want to get per hour for your labor.....the same as you would if walking into any contracted job. without that info, you can not fix a price on anything, cause you're shooting in the dark. once you've figured that info out, break that down into a per serving price.

i typically get anywhere from $15-$20 per hour right now, but i get much more if the client is a pita or it's a design i don't really want to do!