My husband and I decided that we would put my dream into full go this summer. However, we are currently renting a townhouse and therefore cannot put a separate kitchen into our space. I know that in Wisconsin, we currently do not have a cottage law unless you go through the whole process. I do have my food manager license as well as all of our business licenses that we need. How have you gone about renting a kitchen or some space? Also, do any of you use a binder or anything professional to show to your clients about different shapes and sizes of cakes, what will serve how many, etc? Please help as I don't want to embarrass our industry more than some people already have. Thanks for all of your help in advance.

AI have a digital portfolio on my iPad mini and I also use the cake stacker app for iPad & I phone. The app is a quick way to calculate servings and show a visual of cake size/shape. Having a tablet has saved me carrying a bunch of stuff around and I can add a square reader too so I can take payments.

AI have several cake dummies I put out on display during a consultation. The cakes are common sizes... 3 tier all round cake, 4 tier all round cake, 5 tier square cake, 4 tier mix and match shapes cake. It makes it easy to say "see the 4 all round tier cake, that feeds 120 so that is the size of your cake."

I also have my porfolio of cakes I have made out for clients to look at. If they see a cake they like I can point to one of my dummies to show a comparision of size.

But what do you do when you do not have your own space to set up dummies, etc? Do you bring things with
 you to wherever you go? What would you all suggest?

I am a hobby baker so this might be off but could you set up consultations/the business side at home and rent a kitchen specifically for baking only? that way you can have dummies and portfolios and examples set up at home and not have to lug them around with you...just a thought.

AInstead of decorated dummies you could just bring several undecorated individual dummies to mix and match for the consultation and just use a professional looking porfolio or iPad display for clients to look at. The individual dummies could be kept in a box in your trunk.