Pricing Help for Chocolate M&M Cake

[Lisahg]

Hi!

I got a cake order, and made this one.
It's a chocolate cake, with chocolate butter cream and salt caramel around.
Inside the cake its M&M that will float out.

I dont know how much I can take for it?
Just the cake it self with the decoration cost 58$.

Hope anyone can help me

 

[Norcalbaker59]

Hi!

I got a cake order, and made this one.
It's a chocolate cake, with chocolate butter cream and salt caramel around.
Inside the cake its M&M that will float out.

I dont know how much I can take for it?
Just the cake it self with the decoration cost 58$.

Hope anyone can help me

You can only charge what customers in your area are willing to pay. What a customer will pay in San Francisco or New York City is not going to be the same as what a customer is willing to pay in a small town. You have to know your local market.


Just an aside, $58 for ingredients is extremely high for a cake. Perhaps you incorrectly calculated costs by using the full package costs of each ingredient, rather than the cost of only what was actually used to make the cake.


To cost properly you only add up the costs of ingredients you actually used.


For example, if you purchased a 5 pound sack of flour for $4. The cost of the flour per ounce is 5 cents.


You use 10 ounce to make this cake; so your flour cost for the cake is 50 cents, not $4.


If you bought a pound of butter for $5, but only used 1 stick, the cost of butter is $1.25, not $5.


You should not charge a customer for ingredients you did not actually use in the cake.

 

[Becky]

There are all kinds of ways to work out a selling price for a cake, but @Norcalbaker59 is right that you are limited by what people are willing to pay.

Once you have worked out the cost of your ingredients (as described in the post above) you could add on a cost for your time (eg an hourly rate multiplied by the time taken to bake and decorate), plus the cost of running your oven too if you like, and that will give you a total cost.

However it also depends on why you made the cake - if it's a favour for a friend you may want to charge less, but if you are doing this as a business you might want to charge more - as long as you are charging a price people are willing to pay.