My First Professional Cake Order

My first professional cake order was by far the most hectic of all cake orders. The reason is that with other cake orders I have made in the past, they were simple cake and frosting orders. Those orders can be made within the night and be ready to be sold or consumed the next day. However this cake order used fondant. This made the cake making process more time consuming and overall much more labor intensive.

What I've learned through making cakes this entire year added to my overall experience as a baker. Even though I'm in IT, I was surprised I was able to execute this task and deliver on time to the clients. Let me present you the details for this order so you understand what was required and how I provided my clients with what they requested which was 1 Minion Cake and 100 minion Cupcakes.

If you have followed my other posts, you know I already make cakes. However in this case, this cake was 6 tiers high. Meaning I have to make 3 regular cakes, cut them in half, and in between the cake slices, I used Chocolate Buttercream.
I then had to carve the top a bit to provide that sloped edge to create the head.

In order to balance all 6 tiers i had to use bubble tea straws , four of them and stick them in the middle to add stability. I could have used wooden dowels, but after doing some research bubble tea straws are thicker and hold up cake quite nicely. So then I provided a crumb coat with the chocolate butter cream and let it chill in the fridge.

As it was chilling next up I had to make 100 cup cakes. The cupcakes were to be used as a giveaway for the event I was catering to which was a 1st Birthday. Thankfully, the recipe didn't change, so the same recipe I used for the cake is the same recipe used for the cupcake. So after making 100 cupcakes which only took less than 3 hours I was done and I let them cool off then placed plastic wrap and set those in the fridge to rest and chill

The grueling part of this entire experience was the fondant used to create the body of the Minion. Fondant is not a "gentle" or " easy" thing you can mold or shape into. You need to kneed the fondant into the shape, place the right amount of food coloring to closely match your model. Then you need to roll the fondant to a certain millimeter thickness. This part took better part of an entire day to get done. I had to create a yellow fondant coating for the main cake. then I had to create other fondant parts to make the cake look like a minion. Thos parts were the glasses and the blue trousers. The last part was making small circles for the cupcakes and making a miniature version of the minion.
This part was more labor intensive than the actual cake.

In the end the customer was satisfied. The kids and parents of the event were thrilled and even complemented me on the cake. The overall experience was heart warming because I just gotten into baking earlier this year and I've come this far from where I originally started out. Can you believe that before all this I was making cake in a toaster oven and rice cooker? Yeah trust me this story is true. However after understanding my ingredients and saving up for some professional tools and a bigger oven. I was able to use the money from my cake sales and get to this point. All the hard work even with my day job as an IT professional I was able to make it this far.

I am proud of myself, I can't wait for my contract to end with this IT job and start getting seriously into the other projects I have for this year such as my baking career. I've made so much clients it can't get any better than this.

Hard work pays off, I'm glad to share this article with you guys.

-SW