I am doing a 3D cake this weekend which I've never done before, its for a friend and I am not going to charge, its my bday gift to him. For future references if I was to get an order off this cake for more 3D cakes, how do you all price yours??? Is it the same as your regular pricing or more or less? I've been under charging on my cakes for a LONG time and I want to make sure that I am doing it right for a general area.

When you say 3D cake, do you mean a sculpted cake or a cake with 3D decorations on it? If I'm doing a sculpted cake, my base price starts at the number of servings the original cake would give me, which is about $3.50 a serving. I add on from there, depending on the degree of difficulty. I pay myself a salary of $10 an hour, so the time it takes to sculpt, cover and decorate the cake has to come out of what you charge for it, as does your overhead (gas/electricity, depreciation of equipment, etc.) and a profit for your business. If you're doing a regluar shaped cake with 3D decorations, the same basic principles apply - the number of servings you'll be making, plus the time it takes you to make the decorations, as well as overhead, profit, etc. I can't tell you exactly how much to charge, because this depends on a lot of local variables, but I hope this will give you some help on figuring it out.

I have a hard time figuring out how much time it will take me to make a cake. The customer usually asks for a price before they commit to an order.

You're right about it being difficult to estimate the amount of time it takes to make a cake. This is something that gets easier the more cakes you make. I wonder if your past experience in baking and decorating could help you out here. I find that $3.50 a serving (plus more if the decoration is very complicated) about covers it for me, but this depends a lot on the cost of living where you are.

Its a sculpted cake. Thank you for the input I will have to use that..