Creating wedding cakes can be one of the most rewarding parts of being a cake maker. You get to play a small but very special part in somebody’s wedding day, turn their ideas into something completely unique and, of course, create a cake that hopefully tastes every bit as good as it looks!
But over the years, I’ve learnt that becoming a successful wedding cake maker involves much more than simply being able to make a beautiful cake.
Your cake-making skills are incredibly important, but so are your confidence, your pricing, the experience you give your couples, how organised you are and your ability to actually get your cakes in front of the right people.
And none of those things happen overnight.
Whether you’re thinking about moving into wedding cakes or you’re already making them and would like to grow your business, I’ve put together some of the things I think are really important to work on.
1. Get Confident With the Cake-Making Basics
Beautiful wedding cakes need good foundations.
Before worrying about finding more customers or growing your business, you need to know that you can consistently produce cakes you’re proud to put your name to.
That certainly doesn’t mean knowing every cake decorating technique imaginable. I’m still learning too, and that’s one of the things I love about cake decorating – there is always something new to discover!
Instead, concentrate on becoming confident with the techniques you’re most likely to need for the kind of wedding cakes you want to create.
That might include:
- Baking consistent cakes that taste as good as they look
- Filling, stacking and safely supporting tiered cakes
- Creating smooth ganache, buttercream or fondant finishes
- Understanding cake portions and tier sizes
- Working with different textures and decorating techniques
- Safely adding flowers and decorative elements
- Transporting, assembling and setting up wedding cakes
- Understanding how different cakes and finishes behave in different condition`
Wedding cakes often require a little more planning and precision than an everyday celebration cake. You’re creating something for a wedding date that can’t simply be moved if something goes wrong!
The more comfortable you become with the fundamentals, the more confidence you’ll have when somebody asks you to create something a little more ambitious.
2. You Don’t Have to Know How to Do Everything
One thing I see cake makers do time and time again is compare themselves with everybody else.
And social media certainly doesn’t help!
It’s incredibly easy to scroll through Instagram or Pinterest, see one beautiful wedding cake after another and start thinking that you should be able to create every technique you see.
You really don’t have to.
Some cake makers become known for incredible sugar flowers. Others develop beautiful contemporary styles, buttercream finishes, intricate piping, sharp edges or highly textured designs.
Finding the techniques you love and gradually developing your own style can actually become one of the things that sets your business apart.
It’s also perfectly normal for a customer to ask for something you’ve never done before.
Sometimes that’s a fantastic opportunity to learn a new skill. Give yourself plenty of time to practise it first, work out what works (and what doesn’t!) and make sure you’re confident before trying it on a customer’s wedding cake.
And sometimes you may decide a particular design is simply outside your experience at the moment. That’s absolutely fine too.
Continuing to learn doesn’t mean you’re not good enough. It’s simply part of being a cake maker.
3. Confidence Comes With Practice
I don’t think you can wait until you feel completely confident before doing something new.
Quite often, the confidence comes after you’ve done it.
Your first three-tier wedding cake might feel terrifying. So might your first large sugar flower arrangement, your first wedding consultation or the first time you arrive at a venue and have to assemble a cake on site.
But then you’ve done it once.
The next time, you know a little more about what to expect.
That’s why practising new techniques is so important. Give yourself opportunities to experiment when there isn’t the pressure of a customer’s wedding day attached to it.
Practice cakes are also a brilliant way to start creating the kind of portfolio you want.
If you’d love to make more modern wedding cakes, for example, don’t wait until somebody orders one. Create one. Photograph it beautifully and start showing potential customers the type of work you’d like them to book you for.
Every cake teaches you something, and all of those little lessons gradually build your confidence.
4. Learn How to Run the Business – Not Just Make the Cakes
This is a big one.
Being a talented cake decorator doesn’t automatically mean you’ll find running a cake business easy.
I think a lot of us naturally concentrate on the cake side because that’s the bit we love. But if you want to turn wedding cakes into a successful business, there are lots of other skills you need to develop too.
You’ll need to think about things such as:
- Your actual costs
- How much time your cakes take
- Your overheads
- How you price your work
- Deposits and payment schedules
- Customer enquiries and communication
- Consultations and tastings
- Terms and conditions
- Ordering ingredients and supplies
- Managing your diary
- Delivery and venue set-up
- Marketing your business
It can feel like a lot, especially when you’re first starting out.
But you don’t need to master everything at once.
The important thing is recognising that these things matter just as much as learning another decorating technique.
The goal isn’t simply to make more cakes.
It’s to build a cake business that actually works for you.
5. Learn to Price Your Wedding Cakes With Confidence
If there’s one thing I know many cake makers struggle with, it’s pricing!
It can be incredibly difficult to put a value on something you’ve made yourself, particularly when you’re still building your confidence.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is looking at what another cake maker charges and assuming you should charge roughly the same.
You don’t know their costs.
You don’t know how long their cakes take them to make, what their overheads are or even whether they’re actually making a profit at the prices they’re charging.
Wedding cakes also involve so much work that the customer never sees.
There can be consultations, emails, designing, ordering materials, baking, filling, decorating, cleaning, packaging, travelling, setting up at the venue and sometimes coordinating with florists, venues or other suppliers.
All of that time is part of creating that finished wedding cake.
Understanding your own numbers makes it much easier to give somebody a price without immediately worrying that you’re charging too much.
I’ll be looking at this in much more detail in How to Price Wedding Cakes for Profit Without Underselling Yourself, because I think pricing deserves an article all of its own.
6. Give Your Couples a Great Experience
Something else I’ve learnt over the years is that your couples aren’t just buying a cake from you.
They’re trusting you with a part of one of the biggest days of their lives.
And how you make them feel throughout that process matters.
Reply professionally to enquiries. Explain clearly what happens next. Ask questions. Listen to what they actually want. Keep good records and confirm important details in writing.
Most importantly, try to make your part of their wedding planning feel easy.
Couples are juggling venues, dresses, flowers, photographers, guest lists and countless other decisions. If dealing with their cake maker feels organised, enjoyable and stress-free, they’re going to remember that.
And that experience can continue helping your business long after the wedding.
Happy couples leave lovely reviews. They recommend you to friends. They share photographs. They may even mention you to other wedding suppliers.
A good reputation takes time to build, but it can become one of the most valuable things your business has.
7. Find Your Own Style
You don’t need every couple getting married to love your cakes.
In fact, I think trying to appeal to everybody can make things much harder.
Think about the cakes you genuinely enjoy making.
Are they elegant and traditional? Colourful and contemporary? Floral? Rustic? Highly detailed? Minimalist? Bold and unusual?
As you make more cakes, you’ll naturally start discovering the techniques and styles you particularly enjoy.
Let your portfolio reflect that.
If there is a particular type of wedding cake you’d love to make more of, show people that work.
The aim is for the right customer to arrive on your website or social media, look at your cakes and think:
“That’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
When somebody specifically wants your style and your expertise, you’re no longer simply one cake maker on a list of people they’re comparing on price.
8. Learn How to Market Your Wedding Cake Business
You could make the most incredible wedding cakes in the world, but unfortunately that doesn’t automatically mean people are going to find you.
Marketing is another skill that I’ve had to learn throughout my career, and there are lots of different ways you can approach it.
For a wedding cake business, that might include:
- Your website and appearing in Google
- Social media
- Customer reviews
- Relationships with wedding venues
- Relationships with photographers and other suppliers
- Wedding fairs
- Styled shoots
- Recommendations and referrals
- Email marketing
- Great photography of your cakes
You don’t need to try to do everything.
In fact, trying to be everywhere can quickly become exhausting when you’re also trying to run the rest of your business.
Choose the marketing channels that make sense for you and work on them consistently.
And remember that more enquiries aren’t necessarily the goal.
What you really want are more enquiries from the right people – couples who love your style, value what you do and have an appropriate budget for the cakes you create.
I’ll go into this properly in How to Get More Wedding Cake Bookings: Marketing Tips for Cake Makers, where we’ll look at some of the different ways you can start getting your cakes in front of more potential customers.
9. Build Relationships With Other Wedding Suppliers
One of the lovely things about working in weddings is that you’re surrounded by lots of other creative businesses.
Venues, florists, photographers, wedding planners and other suppliers are all regularly talking to couples who are planning their weddings.
Getting to know those people can be incredibly valuable.
That doesn’t mean emailing every wedding venue in your area asking them to recommend you!
Think about building genuine relationships.
When you’re delivering a cake to a venue, be professional and friendly. Introduce yourself. Respect their space and their timings.
If a photographer sends you beautiful photographs of one of your cakes, credit them when you share the images.
If you’re involved in a styled shoot, get to know the other suppliers involved.
Over time, being known as somebody who is reliable, professional and lovely to work with can open doors you might never have expected.
10. Get Organised Before You Get Really Busy
When you’ve only got the occasional wedding cake in your diary, it’s quite easy to keep everything in your head.
Then suddenly you have three weddings in the same week and you’re trying to remember who wanted which flavour, whether somebody has paid their final balance and what time you’re supposed to be at three different venues!
This is where systems become your friend.
They don’t need to be complicated.
You might have templates for your enquiry responses, consultation forms, booking confirmations and final-detail emails.
You could have a checklist for every wedding week so you know exactly what needs ordering, baking, decorating and packing.
You might block out particular days for admin, baking or consultations.
Find a system that works for you.
The idea isn’t to make your business feel rigid or corporate. It’s simply to stop your brain having to remember absolutely everything.
That gives you more time and energy for the creative part of the job.
11. Keep Learning – But Not Just About Cake
There will always be another cake technique you could learn.
But one of the biggest pieces of advice I can give you is not to make cake decorating the only thing you invest your time in.
Learning a little about photography might help you show your cakes off beautifully.
Understanding marketing could help the right couples discover you.
Improving your pricing could mean you earn more without actually making more cakes.
Learning more about sales could give you greater confidence during consultations.
And understanding your accounts could help you make much better decisions about your business.
Sometimes the thing that moves your wedding cake business forward isn’t another decorating technique at all.
You Don’t Have to Figure It All Out By Yourself
Running a cake business can sometimes feel surprisingly lonely.
You can spend hours working by yourself and then find yourself trying to make decisions about pricing, customers, techniques or marketing without anybody around who really understands what running a cake business is like.
It’s one of the reasons I created my Wedding Cake Lounge.
I wanted to create somewhere cake makers could learn, ask questions, build their confidence and be part of a supportive community.
Inside the Lounge, I share the knowledge I’ve built throughout my career as a cake designer and tutor, with cake tutorials and workshops, recipes, templates, guest demonstrations, supplier discounts and lots more.
But I also wanted it to cover the business side of being a cake maker.
That’s why I invite expert guest speakers into the Lounge to talk about subjects such as marketing, social media, sales and accounting – all those things we need to understand but might not have imagined we’d need when we first fell in love with making cakes!
If you’d like some extra support as you develop your cakes and grow your business, you can find out more about the Wedding Cake Lounge here.
Give Yourself Time
If I could give one piece of advice to any cake maker wanting to build a successful wedding cake business, it would be to give yourself time.
You don’t need to know everything before you start.
And you certainly don’t need to be able to recreate every beautiful wedding cake you see on Instagram!
Keep learning. Keep practising. Ask for help when you need it and don’t be frightened of making mistakes along the way.
Every wedding cake you make will teach you something.
Every customer will teach you something.
And every challenge you work through adds a little more experience and confidence.
All of those small lessons are what gradually help you become a better wedding cake maker – and build a stronger business around something you genuinely love doing.
