Top 3 Mistakes I made with my Custom Cake business

Hi Friends,

I hope you're having a nice week! We've experienced some big storms here in California. I hope you and your family are safe and warm during these Winter months.  

This week I want to share some hard-learned lessons I've picked up along my cake decorating journey. I'm hoping these will help you in your journey. 

Here's the top 3 mistakes I've made:

1. Waiting to be feel 'good enough' to sell my cakes. Before selling cakes I made cakes for friends and family. Although they liked my cakes, I never felt they were good enough to sell. My thoughts were, that since I didn't go to culinary school, and I am self taught, who would buy my cakes??

I used to think that if I was 'good enough', someone would tell me, or I would have some special certificate. I now realize that I was just too scared to make a mistake and too scared to start! It wasn't until I had no job and two babies at home that I finally jumped right in... yup, I was forced in! 

If I could do it again, I would tell myself "your skills are enough, you will learn along the way, and you do not need to be perfect". Easy to say in hindsight, right?! Here is a picture of one of my first cakes!

2. Not taking a deposit. I spent days completed 2 orders that I never got paid for (this one below is one of them!). I initially didn't take deposits because somehow I thought orders needed to be 'done' before a customer should had to pay for it. Also, I liked the simplicity of only managing one payment for each order. 

However, after these experiences I did start taking deposits and resorted to managing multiple payments for different order (I use QuickBooks).

In the past few years, however, I've started having customers pay for their orders in full one week in advance. This has really helped streamline things. Now, with the order paid in full, I have funds to buy everything in advance, I don't have to worry about payments coming in, and can focus entirely on making the cake! 

3. Not using cake boxes. Boxing custom cakes is tough because they are were either too tall or too wide to find a good box. So I simply didn't box cakes in general. However, throughout the years I've learned that using a cake box helps reduce sweating and condensation on the cake. 

This is because when stored in the fridge, the box acts as a barrier between the cold air and the cake. Once I started doing this I realized that I could store a cake with all toppers and everything on it and not deal with condensation. 

So today, every cake is boxed! Although it is still difficult to find a good box, ecommerce shipping boxes sure helps. I like to save a pile of good size boxes from shipped products. I cut any sides, bottom and top, to help make the cake fit, as well as add a plastic wrap 'window'.

A side note on this... I learned this when I had a commercial refridgerator. No matter how much I tried, the commercial fridge was horrible at forming condensation on my cakes. I longed to go back to just a regular fridge that didn't do that. Today I use a regular refridgerator and remove shelves to fit any cake boxes. 

And that's it, 

Thanks for reading along friends, have a great week! :)

Christie