This came up on my Facebook timeline as a memory the other day, which I wrote a year ago when someone wanted this for £50 ;-) -
A note about bespoke cakes
I'd like to share with you the cake I made last week :-) Firstly, because I'm really pleased with it - and the customer was too, which is obviously the main thing! But also secondly, because I thought perhaps it was a good time to let people know a bit about the care, time and love that goes into decorating cakes like this (and therefore cost ;-) ) :-)
I am a perfectionist, I'll admit that - which is why when someone orders a cake from me, they can be confident they're going to get the best I can do on the design they'd like. Baking the actual cake, generally, takes very little of the total time I spend on a cake. A lot of people can bake a cake :-) What's different about something like this castle, is that it's obviously not just about baking the cake - that's just the start - and it's this sort of decoration and detail that you're paying for when you ask me to make your cake.
Making things generally does not pay well. Most people who make things do it, in part, because they love doing it - but if they've chosen to take orders and make them for other people, it is also a business and, as such, needs to pay sensibly. Everyone's budget for something is different and it's completely understandable that not everyone will either want to, choose to or be able to afford to pay more than a certain amount for something. But it is also important to realise that, sometimes, something is out of budget for someone and not for someone else. Different people choose to or need to spend their money on different things. That's the way it is. And that's OK :-) It's OK with me if I've quoted more than your budget and you don't go ahead. It's OK with me if it's a bit over your budget and you ask if there's anything we can compromise on to bring it into budget. And it's OK with me, obviously, if you love it and you want to go ahead :-)
When someone asks me how much it would be to make a bespoke cake for them, firstly I spend time talking to them or messaging them to find out what it is they would like. I spend time researching ideas, working out how to do it, what design to do, whether I'll need to buy anything specific I don't have in stock and, if so, I go and get it. I take into account how and how far they're going to transport it. Baking the cake itself is a very small amount of the time I spend on the whole cake. Even the cost of the ingredients of a cake are a relatively small part of the overall cost. What costs you for your bespoke cake is my time. Factored into that cost should also be my experience, courses I've been on, time I've spent learning how to do things, time I spend working out how to do something differently to how it might usually be done so it arrives in one piece after you've transported it up to Scotland or whereever ;-) Also that I am registered with the Food Standards Agency and have appropriate insurance and food hygiene ratings (and some people aren't/don't, even though they should). But mainly - it takes a good number of hours to decorate a cake like this!
For example, this castle cake took me over 13 hours to bake and decorate. Part of that was that the cake recipe itself was more timeconsuming than my usual sponge recipe. But even so, it still took well over 10 hours to decorate (and that's not including any of the time discussing requirements with the customer, which I make sure I do in detail because it's important to me to make sure I produce what the customer wants and is going to be delighted with).
I also have no idea as soon as someone messages me, exactly how long the cake it going to take. It takes time to work that out ;-)
Currently [written originally in October 2015] the minimum wage in the UK outside London is £6.70 per hour. The current living wage is £7.85 per hour. That means if I was employed by someone, they would by law have to pay me at least £88 for the hours I spent on this cake. If they were paying the living wage, the same number of hours would be £102+. (Obviously more if you included the discussing and quoting time - and that's excluding the ingredients). For comparison, to have a cleaner around here costs £10-£12 per hour - on that hourly rate, this cake would cost £130-£156 + ingredients....
Most people who make things don't get minimum wage for their time, because it seems a lot of people who ask them to do things don't expect to pay them minimum wage for doing it :-(
As I said above, It's OK if I've quoted more than someone's budget and they don't go ahead. It's OK if it's a bit over budget and they ask if there's anything we can compromise on to bring it into budget. What's not OK is for someone to say "I don't like your quote. Will you do the same thing for this much less?" I've had people ask me to reduce my quote (which is rarely as much as minimum hourly wage) by as much as 50% - and they expect me to take them up on their kind offer... ;-) I'm proud to say I think my cakes and my time - and my self-respect - are worth more than that :-) Thank you for supporting local individual businesses. x
www.facebook.com/makeyourowncakes/photos/?tab=album&album_id=482233065277896