So I'm almost a year into baking and decorating and was asked to do a baby shower cake for a family friend. I'm just getting into this so I feel bad charging a lot but I never end up making money because I'll have to run out and buy something I forgot silly things like that.

Here's what they want:
2 Tier Cake Red Velvet with Cream Cheese Frosting
Top Tier "8 Round covered in cream cheese with fondant accents around the sides with a gum paste topper.
Bottom Tier "10 Round covered in cream cheese frosting with fondant accents around the sides.

**Similar to this - http://www.lovinovencakery.com/gallery/two-tiered-cake/
but all baby decorations bottles, rattles, diaper pins, ducks, teddy bears etc, along with a topper.

24 Cupcakes - 12 Chocolate, 12 Vanilla with buttercream frosting.
Topped with small fondant decorations.

***All decorations will be made with my cricut.

Here's the price I got for all the ingredients, fondant, cake boards, box etc. The stuff I can think of at least. And I don't need everything on the list but I'm going to need to buy it after I'm done because I'll need it to replenish what I have.

The total I got is $144.07

How much would you charge? Again, it's for a family friend so what kind of discount would you apply after your final price?

How much time is this cake going to take you? Don't forget to give yourself an hourly rate for everything from making your grocery list, driving to the store, shopping, prepping, baking, decorating to putting away the last piece of equipment after it's been washed and dried.

When operating as a business...I feel the hourly rate comes second to local market value...in other words, compare your quality of both baking and decorating to what the local market offers, and base your prices off of that. If you are spending more than you are making, then you are simply spending too much and you need to look where you can save on materials (This includes your gas and time spent shopping). Your hourly wage will get higher the faster you get. Just because it takes you 24 hours to make a cake vs. 4 hours doesn't mean you can charge 6xs as much for that cake....You can only make money and sell your product so long as it fits within your "market". Before I began baking for customers...I figured out how much cakes were worth, and what people in our area expected. You need to know ALL your costs, including boxes, cake boards, ribbon..everything. The best, and my most favorite way of learning market value...BUY from your competitors! Yep...buy a cupcake, cake, whatever, know how much they charge, how they taste, how they decorate! Market research doesn't have to be boring In the baking world, it can be pretty "sweet" tehehehe

I really want to be helpful, but you ask an impossible question. Don't take this the wrong way, but what we would charge is completely irrelevant to what you should/could charge. I charge based on my experience, ingredients and overhead, all of which are completely unique to me and where I live.

But where I can help is I could tell you right now, you have to have some bad math somewhere unless you are including the total cost of pans, decorating tools, entire bags of flour, sugar and other items that you won't be using 100% of for that order alone. If so, you are incorrectly calculating your cost of goods sold (COGS). You should only be pricing out the actual ingredients you will be using for that order and that order alone.

Example, you need to buy milk for your recipe. So you buy 1 gallon (128 oz) of milk for $4 (that's $.04 per ounce.). But you only need 3 cups for your recipe (24oz). COGS = $0.96

You buy a 5 lb bag of sugar for $5. You only need 1lb. COGS = $1.

Add up all your COGS and that will give you the total cost of your ingredients for the order. Add on labor and your overhead and you should be somewhere in the ball park of what you "should" charge.

Sure, you may need to buy $144 worth of stuff, but you get to keep what you don't use.

Hope that helps at least a little bit