Self Employment: Surprise! You Are the Entire Company
There is a persistent myth about running a wedding cake business that you get to spend your days doing the thing you love.
I design cakes.
I also work in accounts, marketing, purchasing, customer service, logistics, food safety, photography, website management, SEO, stock control and cleaning.
So much cleaning.
Apparently, I am the entire company.
The Cake Is the Bit You See
When you see one of my finished wedding cakes or dessert installations, you’re seeing the end of a process that started long before I switched an oven on.
There have been enquiries to answer, quotes to prepare, designs to sketch, ingredients and materials to source, orders to place, invoices to manage and delivery logistics to work out.
Then there’s the website. SEO. Blogs. Social media. Food safety management. Records. Stock. Emails.
None of it is particularly glamorous, but all of it has to happen before I can get anywhere near the part of my job I actually love.
And it never really ends.
I Did Not Become a Cake Designer Because I Love Admin
For the record, I don’t hate all paperwork.
Give me a design brief and let me sketch ideas and I’m perfectly happy.
Give me general admin and suddenly I can think of approximately 47 other things I’d rather be doing.
Unfortunately, when you’re self-employed, there isn’t another department to send it to.
If a quote needs writing, I write it.
If the website needs updating, I update it.
If a supplier needs chasing, I chase them.
If Google decides it would quite like some fresh content this week, apparently I’m writing a blog.
Hello.
The Hidden Work Behind Running a Wedding Cake Business
October is a perfect example.
I have a very busy month coming up, which meant spending an entire afternoon sourcing and ordering everything I need for upcoming commissions.
That sounds simple until you realise one cake might need very specific materials, colours, structural pieces or decorative elements that aren’t sitting conveniently on a supermarket shelf.
So you find them. Compare them. Check sizes. Check quantities. Order everything.
And then, after you’ve paid, you get the email.
Sorry, this item is out of stock.
Brilliant.
Now I get to source it all over again.
There can be hours of work behind a cake before a single ingredient has been weighed.
And Then There Is the Cleaning
Nobody puts this bit in the glamorous behind-the-scenes videos.
One cake with several colours of buttercream can easily result in ten bowls being used.
Ten.
Then there are mixers, paddles, spatulas, scrapers, jugs, pans, worktops and floors.
My studio floor seems to be approximately seventeen miles long whenever I’m holding a mop.
In fact, if I could employ somebody tomorrow to take one job off me, I know exactly what I’d choose.
Cleaning.
Not another cake designer. Not somebody to do the creative work.
Someone please just mop the bloody floor.
What Does Running a Wedding Cake Business Actually Cost?
Ingredients are only one part of the cost of creating a cake.
You’re also paying for the time spent developing the design, sourcing what’s needed, managing the order, maintaining a professional food business, keeping records, running a studio and ultimately having the experience and skill to turn an idea into something that works in real life.
That doesn’t mean every minute spent running my business gets added individually to somebody’s invoice.
It means those costs and that time have to exist somewhere within my pricing, because otherwise I don’t have a business.
I have an extremely expensive hobby with a lot of washing up.
But Then I Get to Make It
And that’s the bit that makes everything else worthwhile.
Oddly, baking isn’t even my favourite part.
It’s the point afterwards.
When all the separate pieces I’ve been thinking about finally start coming together. When the colours work the way I imagined. When a texture changes the whole design. When something that existed as a sketch becomes a physical object sitting in front of me.
That’s the part I love.
Then I take it to the venue, set everything up and usually disappear again before the couple sees it. I don’t want to interrupt their wedding day just because I desperately want to stand in the corner waiting for their reaction.
So most of the time, I don’t actually get to see that moment.
But occasionally I do.
And yes, after all the admin, sourcing, emails, food safety records, SEO, washing up and seventeen-mile studio floor…
that bit is still pretty bloody brilliant.
