Hi Everyone,
While I'm not new to making cakes, I'm new to selling them, and before I think about selling cakes and cupcakes, I was wondering if anyone could give me a bit of advice on prices? Just general ideas of prices would be great, because I definatley don't want to be under or over charging!
Maybe someone could tell me prices of say, per sheet cake, per single tier round cake, a single tier carved cake, per cupcake, per dozen cupcakes, per 3 tiered wedding cake?........wow sounds like I'm asking a lot,
anyway any help is great, thanks in advance!

Hiya- I'm in exactly the same boat and have been sat for the last 2 hours figuring out the cost just to make a WASC cake (using the recipe on here).

Its a long process, but I literally figured out the cost per cup of each ingredient I tend to use (butter/flour/eggs/sugar etc) so I could then figure out how much each of my chosen recipes cost. This will obviously depend where you buy ingredients etc, but my costs so far have been done based on ASDA prices so as not to undercharge and make a loss (plan to go wholesale once I get going).

Anyway, I figured a 9" square WASC (x2 as I do 2 layers), plus buttercream to fill & crumb coat, then 1.25kg renshaw regalice to simply cover the cake, worked out at £16.

Having a break for now but plan to figure out my favourite cupcake recipes soon as well, and then my brownies!

HTH!!

Also, depending where you live will make a difference in what people are willing to pay- for example, there are 2 market stall holders in MY town centre and they charge from £1-1.50 per cupcake. I can imagine mine may be more than that, but purely because I want to aim more at the gourmet crowd (really high quality ingredients, IMBC instead of just regular buttercream, filled cupcakes etc).

Also worth thinking about! Know your crowd

Hi Lemmars,
Thankyou for the reply and advice, I think I need to do some serious research!

Yeah, you're right about knowing the crowd you're going to be selling to, I doubt very much that the people in my area will pay gourmet prices, (I live in South Wales!)

I may need to go further a field

Although, saying that the new Krispy Kreme doughnut store in cardiff is doing VERY well and some of the doughnuts are £1.55! hmmm. . . . .

It all depends on where you get ingredients and area you live. Thing which peeves me is when people want your cake but expect to pay supermarket prices !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There is also a cupcake shop in Cardiff which appears to be doing really well and they are a bit more expensive the krispy kreme

Don't forget that when you price up your cakes you need to factor in the cost of things like board, boxes, ribbons, cost to you for things like electricity etc and then on top of that you need to think about how many hours you put into something.

I don't currently do cakes for sale, just for friends so I haven't done any detailed costs for anything yet, just tend to keep track of how much each cake has cost me to make for my own purposes so if I do turn to doing this for sale and I can tell you that I have sometimes shocked myself with how much a cake has ended up costing me to make!

Pricing is definitely a hard one - there's no point me telling you how much i charge for an 8 inch cake, my ingredients may differ in price, my boards, boxes, ribbons may be cheaper here than your town, i may want more money per hour of work than you etc. The way i worked out what to charge for my cakes was as follows, which may help you - i worked out every cost for an 8 inch cake (ingredients, board, box, electricity, clingfilm so on so on), then this was all entered into an excel spreadsheet - from this i worked out what multiplications of my base cake every other cake size was ie 6 inch is 0.5 x base cake, 10 inch is 1.5 x base cake etc for all common tin sizes that i use. From this the spreadsheet calculates everything for me. I also added on charges per hour and a 20% profit markup - giving me my prices that i charge. Easy??? Nope, but once the hard works done at least you have a consistent accurately calculated pricing structure. HTH xxx

Thanks everyone for all your help, I need to do a lot of research!

@Irish_Sue where is the cupcake shop in cardiff? They're doing well and they are more expensive than Krispy Kreme???

Yip, not sure if I can post the link to their website here but they are based in the city centre. If you do a google search for cupcake shop, cardiff you'll find numerous stories about the 'cake rage' incident that occurred there when they ran out of a customers favourite cupcake

@Irish_Sue
Cake Rage??? It must be popular if there was a cake rage incident when they ran out of their favourite cupcake!

I'm off to google this! bye!

@Irish_Sue

I just googled! and I found the cupcake shop, and it jogged my memory! I remember this being on the local news! something about some woman trashing a cake shop! OMG! I just put the story on the cupcake section! Imagine if it was your cupcake store!!! and it had only been open 2 months at the time!