I'm hoping someone can offer me some advice. I have been baking cakes for the last couple of years for family and friends. I use many of the fabulous recipes that I've found here on CC. Most of them start with cake mixes and have pudding in them. I'm wondering how to go about converting these recipes to a bakery. Not sure how cost effective it would be to buy boxes of Duncan Hines cake mixes in a bakery.

Has anyone had success with this? Any advice would be appreciated.

First off, Duncan Hines doesn't make commercial sized cake mixes for a bakery. I worked for a caterer and she ONLY liked Duncan Hines cake. Yes, she bought cases of DH cake mixes from Wal-Mart and whoever has sales going that week. Even though we were making 20+ cake layers at a time, each cake mix was opened one at a time.

I think you can buy pudding mix in commercial sized bags, you would have to see how many cake mixes to the weight of the commercial sized bag of pudding mix and go from there.

As for converting, you can find commercial books with recipes in weights that convert to large scale baking, or make your own. Get a good scale and write each and every weight, even water and eggs in ounces or grams (choose one) and go from there. Then you can easily increase the amount based on the weights easier than measuring all the ingredients with cups. Also, keep track of the size mixing bowl you use. That same caterer had a 5qt, 12qt, 20qt, 30qt and 80qt mixing bowl to choose from. Many new bakers got confused and used the wrong bowl, so keep that on your recipe for reference as well!!!

I am pretty good at converting recipes, up and down. Every test in Culinary School had 10 questions from weight/measurements/increasing/decreasing and so it was really drilled into our heads!!

Tami

Thank you Tammy! I'm surprised, but encouraged to hear that someone else is using Duncan Hines. I knew that they didn't sell wholesale...but they should! They would make a ton of money. Hands down the best cake mix!

I too have been wondering...I figured I'd need to switch over to thinking more by weight than by volume. I am considering switching to scratch as I'm sure is more cost effective....but I just love the recipes I have here....not to mention the ease. But yeah if i ever go larger....thats where it will get interesting.

I completly agree with making a chart. I have a chart for each recipe-one, one and a half, one and two thirds batches etc. It's very helpful.

oh, andAlways by weight!