Here’s a conversation I’ve had more times than I can count. A baker tells me she had her best weekend ever — fully booked, six custom orders, didn’t stop moving. Then she looks at her bank account on Monday and there’s almost nothing there. She assumes she spent it. She didn’t. She never made it in the first place.
The problem is almost never talent. It’s that most bakers price by gut: they look at what the cake “feels” like it’s worth, glance at what someone down the road charges, and pick a number. That number is almost always too low, because it’s missing costs you can’t see while you’re standing at the bench.
The three costs you’re forgetting
When I rebuild a baker’s pricing, the same three line items are missing every single time.
1. Your own time, at a real wage
“I just charge for ingredients plus a bit” is the most expensive sentence in this business. Your hours are a cost. If a tiered cake takes you nine hours across baking, filling, crumb coat, final coat, and decorating, and you’re not paying yourself at least a fair hourly wage inside the price, you are working for free — and paying for the privilege.
2. Overhead you never tally
Electricity for an oven running half the day. Box, board, dowels, ribbon. The mixer that will eventually need replacing. Insurance, your kitchen license, the website. None of it shows up on the grocery receipt, so it never makes it into the price. It still leaves your account.
3. Waste and “oops” batches
The layer that cracked. The batch of buttercream that split and got tossed. The test cake for a new flavor. Real kitchens build a small waste percentage into every price because waste is not an accident — it’s a predictable, recurring cost of doing the work.
If you don’t name a cost, you don’t charge for it. And if you don’t charge for it, you pay for it yourself.
The fix is a formula, not a feeling
Pricing should never be a vibe. It’s ingredients, plus your labor at a real rate, plus overhead, plus a waste buffer — and then a margin on top of all of that, because the margin is your actual profit, the reason the business exists. When every order runs through the same formula, your best weekend ever actually shows up in the bank on Monday.
That formula, with the exact numbers and a ready-to-use cost tracker, is the backbone of the pricing section in the Baking System. But even if you never buy a thing from me: sit down this week and price one cake properly, all four costs included. The number will probably shock you. That shock is the money you’ve been giving away.