Custom Cake Pricing

How easy is this cake?  Well of course that depends on your skill level.  I've been at it for about ten years and it takes me about four hours to do a cake like this.  I find getting a cake smooth tends to be the hardest part to learn for most people.  All you need to make the rest of this cake is some small circle cutters and a knife.  Well some colors, fondant and an owl template helps a lot.  We charge $3.75/per serving for a round buttercream cake and the. $30/hour for artwork and extra supplies.  This is a 6" and 9" and feeds 34.  34 x 3.75 = 127.50.  I would add another 1-2 hours for extra time.  You would need to account for all the time it takes you to mix all these colors and it adds up.  If I only add one hour/$30 that would make the total cake cost $157.50.  Would you pay that much?  Do you think it is too much?  Think about it for a minute before you read on.  I know if you make cakes your opinion will be skewed a bit.  

Now, I don't know how much a cake similar from a big box store would cost.  Said store probably has all their cake layers arrive baked and frozen and their icing is shortening based and comes in 5 gallons buckets.  I'm not trying to be a "snob" about it, I'm just pointing out some of the reasons those stores are cheaper.  The cost of  the ingredients are of course vastly different.  When you buy butter in four pound packs instead of 1,000 pounds at a time, prices are worlds apart.  Lastly, let's consider labor costs.  I don't know how much big box store bakery employes make, but I'm going to be generous and say $10/hour.  I know that after my years of experience, training and education entitles me to more than that.   I would say if you made this cake from buying supplies, baking, washing dishes, making icing,washing more dishes, and such you would have at least eight hours of time in the one cake.  If you subtract $20 for the supplies (a general guess) $20 for overhead (electricity, rent, licenses, insurance, gas,water trash removal etc) it leaves $117 (157.50-20-20=117). Now $117 divided by 8 hours = $14.63/hour.  Now do you still think we charge too much?  If you were a cake business person, how would you do it different?

Accompanying Smash Cake

Easter Cakes and Spending Time with Family

 

When I was very young I knew an older lady that made cute chocolates by painting those plastic molds with colored chocolate and then filling them up. They were so "fancy"!

She got me so interested in it and it really sparked my love of pretty sweets. We have a very sweet niece that came to visit from Portland, Oregon. She wanted to make a cake and I found a simple design that a 14 year old and I could make in a few hours. I baked some layers and made the buttercream early that morning. We tried some different fillings, made fruity pebbles treats for the little stumps, made chocolate icing, filled, iced, and airbrushed. We made some grass, flowers, butterflies, a bunny and a cute fluffy bunny butt!

We had a great time and made a bunch of dishes. This would be a really cute design for someone that is learning and wants to try a cake with lots of wiggle room for error. I hope you are inspired to try even part of this Springtime cake with a special younger family member. You never know what desire you may spark in them!

HAPPY EASTER!

Safari Animal Birthday Cake

We create so few birthday cakes these days that when we get to make one, we tend to go a little overboard.   The cake is really a basic design to be a backdrop for the real stars, the animals.  I added a small piece of styrofoam to lift the top tier so I could have a place to hang the vines.   It really is best for the sake of stability.

We marbled a little fondant for the waterfall  and disguised the source with fondant rocks.  As a side note, if you want some AWESOME looking candy rocks and boulders that are solid chocolate covered in a candy she'll, check out Nuts.com.  I love these people, their almond flour and their cute packaging.
 

There are a million animal tutorials out there, so I can't add much new in that department.   The most important thing to remember is to add tylose to your fondant and let it sit up a while. This step will make your animals not  be droopy or melty looking.   Another tip is to add a little "makeup" to your animals. A little touch of blush will make your animals "come to life"!  Also, if you get the basic way of making an animal, you can search Etsy for an "elephant" and take some inspiration from a greeting card, stuffed animal or most anything.  If you are selling a cake with animals, you should allow about two hours to make each animal.  I'm just saying, don't start the animals at 8pm the night before the cake is due.  Happy animal making!

Calvin & Hobbes First Birthday

We love Calvin and Hobbes, but we can't recreate those sweet characters in 3-D unless we had lots of time and the customer had lots of money to spend.  We have learned over the years to do our level best not to say "no" to a design.  You have to offer options that fit your skill set and their budget.  I don't feel it's right to agree to make a cake that a baker doesn't know IF they can do it.  Almost every cake is unique in my situation, but most aren't made with unfamiliar techniques.  When you are asking a baker to create something you have not seen in their portfolio, offer to pay for a small cake in the same technique before you sign the contract for the larger cake. Please trust me, it will be money well spent, a lot like cake insurance.

 

Part of the awesomeness of the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon is their font, so we made a stencil for the verbiage.  We printed the characters out with edible images and cut them out. For some reason, I wanted the bubble/non flat image so I tried something new. It was not without challenges, mainly trying not to tear or stretch the images. We used the cut images to cut a piece of modeling chocolate out and thinned down the edges.  Then we dry fitted the image again and trimmed again, repeating the process.

“You know, Hobbes, some days even my
lucky rocket ship underpants don't help.”

Woodland Owl Birthday Cake

Sweet Kaeley is one of the only kids I still make a birthday cake for these days.  Her mom is a vendor and sends me lots of business, so it is pretty cheap pay for an unofficial outside sales person.  This year's party was at the Chattanooga Nature Center in their "Tree House" and they were having a real owl come to the party.  Birthday parties were not that cool when I was a kid.....jealous ,  I am.

I love it when  I'm given a few parameters and let to go.  A "fairy, owl, woodland, princess theme" is what I was told.  I didn't want to use "traditional" forest colors, so I went with a silver bark bottom tier, purple owls and mushrooms and bright green leaves!  That's the kind of world I want to live it!   I finally got to use a tree bark impression mat that I just love.  I 'm sorry to say, they don't make it anymore :(

My "lesson" on this cake is to tell you about over building or cake insurance.  When you have any type of heavy fondant figure or item, like my owls, put a wooden skewers up the middle with plenty of skewer to go into the cake.  All my mushrooms and letters/circles have thick floral wire in them.  For the cake support there are big straws in the 11" tree trunk to hold up the top tier.  It was only two layers. The 7" tier was four layers with a cardboard cake board under the bottom two layers and one under the top two tiers.  There are also fat straws supports in the bottom two tiers to hold up the top two.  I used four skewers through all those layer to keep the tier straight and stable.  After I stacked them, I ran a sharpened master dowel through the whole cake.  I never let  a cake out the door without a center dowel.  It's a great insurance policy in itself.  When you drive up a mountain to deliver a cake, nothing is going to move if you build yours in this way.

Unfortunately there are times when all your over building can't stop a bigger problem.  As is the norm, I was carrying the cake to the customers car.  I have four steps to go down as you leave my shop.  I was watching Kaeley and her mom and lost count of how many steps I had already taken.  As I took the last step I realized there was still another step.  I went SMACK on the concrete and so did the cake.   As stupid as I felt, I was more worried about poor Kaeley because she was looking at me with a look of horror.  The first thing she said was "Are you OK?" and then "Is my cake ruined?"  Oh, I hurt but I wasn't going to let her know that.  I said "It's OK, I can fix it.  You are just going to have to stay a little while longer".  She was happy because I have a pink kitchen and edible glitter :)  I gave her and her Mom some fondant and said "help me by making a few butterflies".  That was good because it's hard to work when everyone is looking at you and thinking "How is she going to fix that?" 

I'm truly lucky that I caught the top tier so it didn't land on the ground and because the cake was super cold.  Since my buttercream is all real butter, it's get really hard in the cooler.  That is great for traveling with any cakes.  It took me about 20 minutes to fix the cake, but it felt like two hours.  I am also grateful that the customer was a fellow vendor and she has seen a lot go wrong during wedding set ups and is cool as a cucumber.  She was much more worried about me than the cake which I so appreciate.  I was too busy being embarrassed.  At the end I told Kaeley that the fixed cake has lost all it's glitter and I needed help to get it sparkly again.  She was a big help!   I think all the after boo boo glitter really helped!  (The smaller picture is the "after".  Take my word for it, there was a lot of glitter!"

Kaeley and the "After" Photo!

Kaben's Fifth Birthday - Snake Edition

Well, all good things have to come to a close, and so it goes with the trifecta of cakes for Kaben's birthday.  The last reptile on display is of course, the snake.  I saved making the snake for last because I really thought he would be the easiest to make, but there's more detail to a snake than you would think!!

I did "cheat" a little and put my snake on a cake board that I covered with modeling chocolate as the lid to the crate.  It allowed me to make it and keep it separate until I was finished with the cake.  I also cheated a little on that
"second" snake going into the crate at the bottom.  He didn't take nearly as much time as the big daddy on top of the crate.

For the snake, there is a small rice crispy treat "core" to him, that I then covered in modeling chocolate.  I then used my impression mats to give him is scaly appearance and then painted the bands using petal dusts and PGA

Well, this completes the "Reptile Trilogy" (as it will come to be known).  If you haven't enjoyed the creepy crawlies, make sure to stop back in next week - we'll be discussing a very important business topic!!

Kaben's Fifth Birthday - Iguana Edition

I have to admit that this scaly little monster was my favorite reptile to create for young Kaben's fifth birthday party.  Like the frog before him, he started off with a rice crispy body, which I then covered in modeling chocolate.  He was also based on a toy iguana I bought at the toy store (thank you $1.00 aisle!!).

This little iguana had lots of details, and I made almost all of them out of modeling chocolate.  I made his back "spikes" (that's their real-life name - the fact that I referred to them initially as that was just dumb luck!) out of a thin strip of modeling chocolate that I then used my precision scissors to cut the spikes.  This little guy also had his share of time with the texture mat and the old airbrush gun.

This iguana was sunning himself on a rock, you know, the way iguanas tend to do!  The "rock" is a 2-tier cake which I carved into a jaggy rock shape and then covered in buttercream with a few green mossy bits thrown in for some color.

So what do you think?  Did you guess iguana as the next reptile on the list?  Can you possibly guess which reptile will be slithering your way next week?  Thanks for stopping by - feel free to ask any questions you might have in the comments.

Kaben's Fifth Birthday - Frog Edition

I have blogged about sweet little Kaben several times before here on this blog.  To date, I have done all of his birthday cakes.  His parties are always the best and he picks his very own themes for his parties.  This year was reptile themed.  His Mom asked for 3 separate cakes.  This week we'll focus on this tree frog cake.  Now I should add that she wanted very realistic looking animals.  It was a little out of my comfort zone, but I was up for the challenge. 

I started out with a trip to the toy store to get some toys.  I walked every aisle of Toys R Us, and wouldn't you know it I found all the toys I needed in the dollar bin by the register!

I started by making a rice crispy frog body and then covered the whole thing in white modeling chocolate.  From there it was just molding and sculpting.  I finished him up with a texture mat and some airbrushing / petal dust painting.

As for the cake, this was basically a 2-tiered tree stump cake with rice crispy limbs.  The cake is rough iced in buttercream and then airbrushed with several shades of black and brown to give it a realistic bark effect.

I hope you enjoyed the frog cake, stop back in next week to the see the second of Kaben's 3 cakes.  What reptiles do you think are on the other 2 cakes??

Kaben's Birthday Hoedown

Recently I did Kaben's 4th birthday cake.  I have mentioned Kaben here on the blog a few times before, since I have done all of his birthday cakes.  He is such an amazing little boy, and he always gives us such great ideas for his party cake.  This year's party theme involved a petting zoo, cowboy hats, cactus balloon sculptures - certainly enough for me to create a cake around.  It all worked so well at The Car Barn!

Our cake starts out with the bottom cake tier as a wooden crate covered with modeling chocolate "wooden" panels.  We also made his name using wood planks also made from modeling chocolate.  We used a Wilton #3 tip to make mail holes in the planks.

The next tier was covered in blue fondant and made to look like denim blue jeans complete with little pockets and stitching.  We also made a horseshoe inspired 4 made from gumpaste for rigidity.

The next tier was a bandanna in John Deere yellow and green. I gathered the fondant a little and finished the tier with a little fondant knot.

The next tier was inspired by the petting zoo.  Just a green fondant "hill" with a rickety country fence.  There were a few animals made from modeling chocolate poking their cute little head through.

Cars is still Kaben's favorite cartoon, so we incorporated one of the tractor "cows" into the cake as a topper. I used some pictures from the Internet to sculpt a tractor from modeling chocolate.  Now Kaben also wanted his tractor to "moo" just like on the cartoon.  He was too high on the cake for Kaben to reach, so we used a recordable sound module and incorporated it into a tractor tire on the cake board.  Now my frequent readers here will know that this is totally Chad's area of expertise.  He took the module into the office and about 2 minutes later he came back with with the sounds on it.  I thought he had pulled up some sound database on the Internet to record it from.  It wasn't until the next day that he told me he just mooed into it.  I couldn't believe it, but it sounded great!  I guess if this cake thing doesn't work out, he has a career as a cow impersonator!  LOL!!

Thanks for stopping by and reading my little old blog.  I know this was long, so here's a closeup of that tractor sculpture as a special bonus for sticking around!

Ahoy Boy Baby Shower Cake

A few weeks ago I got a call from Rodney.  His sister was having a baby and wanted a really fantastic cake for her baby shower.  The decorations were all based off the Ahoy Baby Boy set of plates and decorations.

We wanted the cake to be a very bright color scheme, but still keep that baby blue motif.  I printed out a few sheets of blue gingham on edible image sheets and used it as a border on each tier.  I took one of the plates and used it to make templates for the whale, the turtle, and the "BOY" lettering.  The bees were just too small to cut from modeling chocolate, so I printed them out on edible image sheets too.

We delivered this cake to the Rome Library and later that afternoon I got a call from Rodney.  He said that everyone, including his sister, really loved the cake.  That's the kind of feedback we like to hear!!

Montana Cowgirl Cake + Mini Tutorial

A few weeks ago I was lying in bed trying to get sleepy while looking through Pinterest when I saw the cutest Cowgirl Cake by Ana Beatriz Carrard.  I repinned it immediately tn my "Cake Inspiration" board, even though I don't do very many birthday cakes these days.  Wouldn't you know, the VERY next day, I got a call from a former client looking for a cowgirl cake.  I sent her a link to Ana's cake.

Of course, she loved it, so we took several elements from it and created our own cake.  The bandana tier went together much easier than I thought.  I covered the tier with fondant like I normally would and just left a little excess fondant for the folds.  The knot I made separate and just tacked it on to the front.  I made the belt buckle out of modeling chocolate and cut the the birthday girls' name using the Cricut. I searched the web over for a how-to on a fondant cowboy hat, but never found a good one.  In the end it as pretty easy.  I rolled out a gumpaste circle and then just gave it another roll with my rolling pin to "oval" it a little.  For the hat, I sorta made a wide taco shaped piece and molded it from there.  The rhinestone "hatband" ad the crystal heart were pieces left from past projects.  Yes, I have a flotsam bin... don't judge!! ;-)

The horse head is what I really dreaded making.  I'm just not someone that can draw a horse, or even horsey features on a horse-shaped cut out.  But Chaddy and I did something pretty awesome to get the look on those horses.  If you want to find out how, click the link below to finish reading and see the full tutorial!

Smokey the Dog Vols Cake

Before we begin today's post, I just wanted to say "Thanks!" to Kathia over at the Pink Little Cake Blog.  A couple of weeks ago she asked me if I would be willing to participate in her "28 Days of Sweet Halloween Ideas" series.  I was so flattered that she asked me to guest blog on her site. Please visit her site and take a look at my post.  I really went all out and even used some of the food styling tips I learned at the Food Blog Forum!!

OK, now where were we?  Oh yeah!  This weekend I did my first dog cake!  I spent way too much time on it and if I do it again, I will not make the same mistakes I made this time!

I will tell you one thing - I am now in love with Fondarific!!  I have used it in the past to cover small cakes, but nothing as complicated as a carved dog.  I found that I could roll it thinner than regular fondant, which is nice.  It was super stretchy, resisted tearing, tasted great, and didn't get the first wrinkle!  When I really got to checking, it's not even that much more than the fondant I normally use!  I sat down last night and ordered a boatload of the stuff!!

As far as how this bad boy is put together,  there's 80 eggs worth of eggs in the marble pound cake that makes up the body and neck on this guy (he's on a 36 inch board).  The support system was really just a PVC pipe running from the board up through the neck and then a cake board that held on the styrofoam head. Oh yeah, the tail, legs, and feet are all made of crispy rice treats.

I have already heard back from the wedding planner and some of the wedding party... old Smokey was a big hit at the wedding!!

Armadillo Groom's Cake

Now I must have seen Steel Magnolias at least a dozen times, but I have never been asked to do an armadillo cake... until now!

I carved the cake and covered it with fondant, and used my clay tools to make the lines and the armadillo plates.  Then I used oval cutters to make the scales.  I dry brushed the whole thing with dove gray petal dust to give it a more natural look.

When we delivered this to the Grand View Hotel, we ran into the bride and groom and they were both super psyched about their cute little armadillo cake.

Thanks for stopping by and everyone have an excellent week!!

Ladybugs All Dressed in Red

You know that spring is truly here when people start ordering cute ladybug cakes.

Molly was celebrating her birthday, so we used her invitation as inspiration for her cake.  I pulled all the colors and the flower and ladybug motif from the invitation.

You can't tell from the picture, but there's even a cute little 2D ladybug on top of the cake with a big smile on her face.

This was a simple buttercream cake with fondant accents.  I even made Molly a birthday smash cake!

Have a great weekend, maybe even get out and watch some real ladybugs!

Hoppy Easter!

So, what happens when you give a couple of cake artists a dozen eggs and some spare time?!?

Yep!  Tie-Dyed Glitter Eggs!  We had a blast making these little suckers!  After dying them, we got out ALL the luster dusts and edible glitter and just went to town!  My personal favorite was the golden disco glitter egg (look to the middle right in the picture).  It's been forever since we made Easter eggs and for the life of me, I don't know why!

Once that excitement wore down, we thought we would enjoy a cookie break, so we broke out a package of Milano cookes.  30 minutes later...

Yes!  Milano marshmallow sheep!  We're sickos, OK!  But in case you're interested, here's the lowdown on making these cute little guys!  Coat a Milano cookie in white chocolate and cover in  marshmallows.  Once set, use more chocolate to glue on four "feet" (we used some sort of Reeces egg candies).  Now take another milano cookie and using your mini marshmallows, make eyes and ears.  Use more chocolate to glue the cookie head to the cookie/marshmallow body.  Viola!  These little guys will serve as plate decorations / possible dessert for our guests today as we serve Easter lunch!

Happy Easter Everybody!

Another Slice of Chicken Cake??

For the most part, it always seems like my family and friends get the shaft when it comes to their birthday cakes.  I have grandiose plans, but paying customers or lack of time sometimes prevent me from doing just the cake I want.

For example, my brother turned 50 last week and he really likes chickens and roosters.  He especially likes the Poultry in Motion chicken figurines by Sharon Neuhaus.  My initial plan was to make a fabulous cake in the image of one of her creations, but I scrapped that almost immediately when I saw the cake schedule for that week.

I finally wound up making this little clucker.  The cake is sculpted and I used a leaf tip to make the feathers.  The chicken's head and tail were made from modeling chocolate so that it would stand up and be more rigid.

It was a very unconventional 50th birthday cake to be sure, but he loved it!!  Hope you had a great birthday Bubbee!

Animal House!

Recently, I did a cute little cake for young James.  His Mom brought by his party invitations that had the cutest little jungle animals on them.  We used these invitations as inspiration.



Most of the cake is buttercream, but I molded the tiger, giraffe, and monkey out of fondant.

This time, we also made a smash cake.  For first birthdays, we actually sell quite a few of these.  Sometimes my clients get them before the birthday, to use as props for photographs.  Sometimes they just get them so that the birthday boy/girl can grab, smoosh, and rub it in their hair!  What about the other bakers out there... do you do a lot of smash cakes?