I am very new to cake decorating and am LOVING it except the pricing part. I have a couple of questions that if any of you would be so kind as to give your input I would be so grateful. I know that Birthday Cake servings are generally bigger than wedding cake how does this affect the pricing? Do you still charge per serving or would you charge for cake size? Do you charge more for a tiered cake? What about for Fondant/Gumpaste characters, would you charge per character/flower or would you just charge for the time you put in making them.....I am so confused as I want to be paid fairly but at the same rate I don't want to charge so much that nobody would want me to make them a cake...HELP!!
The majority of our business is birthday cakes, and customers are used to buying birthday cakes with set prices instead of per serving, so we've set fixed prices for different sizes of cake (ranging from $4/serving for smaller cakes to $2.50/serving for larger cakes). Multi-tier cakes are prices per serving, usually in the $5-7 range. Custom decorations (beyond a simple border and flowers) cost extra for either birthday cakes or multi-tier cakes based on the labor required.
A few things to watch out for: in some areas you are required to bake out of a commercial kitchen if you sell food products, but other areas allow you to sell cakes made from home. You also need to be careful about reproducing copyrighted characters, as you would need prior permission from the copyright owner to sell a cake decorated with a copyrighted character. Finally, when working out your pricing, make sure you include ingredient costs, labor costs, and overhead costs, along with a 20-30% profit margin.
I don't price and differently, and the servings aren't any bigger. Some of my birthday/celebration cakes are bigger money makers than wedding cakes due to the intricate figurines or gum paste work, so it would be silly to price them lower.
The servings are not bigger. The client may decide to cut them bigger, but the serving is not bigger.
I've been to wedding where soup was served. The serving size on a can of Campbell's soup is 2.5 servings per can. But just because I eat more soup at lunch than I do at a wedding, doesn't mean I get to pay less for the can of soup for my lunch than I do for the can of soup that I serve at my wedding. I just buy more cans of soup for my lunch.
A serving size is a guide. A 10" round cake serves 38. I would tell people "this serves 25-35, depending on how you cut it." Someone having a party for 20 people .... this would be plenty. Someone having a party for 25 people ... would usually order a bigger cake.
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