My best friend has asked me to do a cake for her sister's 30th birthday party. The invitation has "oh no, the big 30" on it. She wanted me to go with the invitation as much as possible, making a very large shaped 3 and 0 and it needs to serve about 60 people. I've not been decorating long and have never done a shaped cake. I have an 11X15 pan and a 12X18 pan. OH, and she wanted to know if I could make them 2 layer cakes to serve more people?? . . .I'm just thinking a lot of wasted cake??? How do you figure how many a shaped cake will serve? And how do you charge for a shaped cake? Anyways. . . .
Thanks in advance for any help!!!

As a rule of thumb I charge $20 for every batch of batter I use. What you could do is make a smaller version of the 30 using the smaller of the cake pans. Bake the cake as usual and then make a stencel out of card board to fit that size cake. (11x15 "30" stencle to fit the cake). You can also use it to figure out how many servings it'll give you. Cut it and fill it and ice it as needed. If you need more servings you can always make another plain filled and iced cake on the side.

I did a cake shaped like a 50 (it's in my gallery), and I ended up finding a font I liked on the computer, then printing out a 5 and a 0. I blew them up really big and taped them close together to make a "50" instead of a "5" and a "0", then I used that as my template to carve my cake. I was dreading icing all the nooks and crannies of a carved 50, but I ended up not cutting out the center of the 0 or any of the inside parts, just iced those parts with the same color as the side of the cake to give the illusion. I don't know if that's making sense, but if you look at the picture, I think you can see what I mean. Not carving out all the little details saved me ALOT of trouble and allowed more servings and less waste, which is a win-win situation if you ask me.

Good luck with the cake!

THANK YOU both for your help!!!!!! I've attached a picture of how it turned out.
I scanned the invitation and blew up the 3 and 0 to make a stencil. The 3 was slightly larger than the 0 so I used my 12X18 for the 3 and was able to cut the 0 from the 11X15. Everyone at the party was very impressed.

Very cute! Great job!!