From Batter to Business: What It Takes to Build a Cake Business

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Turning a love of baking into a successful cake business sounds like a dream come true. You get to create beautiful cakes, celebrate life’s biggest milestones with your customers, and spend your days doing something you love. But what does it really take to turn that passion into a profitable business?

In this episode of The Mixing Bowl Diaries—a conversation hosted by Laura Kate Amrhein, owner of Sweet Stirrings Bakery—we sit down with Jenny, owner of Jenny’s Cake Creations in the New Orleans area, to talk about what it really looks like to build a cake business from the ground up.

From making her son’s first birthday cake to specializing in wedding cakes, hiring employees, opening a commercial kitchen, and expanding into cake decorating classes and a mobile cake cart, Jenny’s journey is full of valuable lessons for aspiring bakers and established bakery owners alike.

We discuss the realities of running a bakery, the importance of understanding your finances, the challenges of managing seasonal business, and why growth often means learning to let go of doing everything yourself.

If you’ve ever dreamed of starting a cake business or wondered what happens behind the scenes of a professional bakery, this conversation is for you!

How Jenny Turned a Hobby Into a Cake Business

It All Started With a Birthday Cake

Like many cake decorators, Jenny didn’t begin her journey with a business plan or a commercial kitchen. She started by making a birthday cake for her son’s first birthday.

As a completely self-taught baker, she became fascinated with cake decorating videos and enjoyed the challenge of learning new techniques and improving her skills. After making that first cake, she continued practicing by recreating designs she saw on Instagram.

She would share her creations on her personal social media page and send leftover cakes to work with her husband for his coworkers to enjoy. What began as a creative hobby gradually turned into something more!

Her first paid cake order came when one of her husband’s coworkers asked her to make a birthday cake. Although the design wasn’t necessarily the modern style she envisioned specializing in, she took on the challenge, delivered the cake, and discovered that people were willing to pay for her work.

It was the beginning of a journey that would eventually lead her to specialize in modern cake designs and wedding cakes.

Knowing When to Turn Your Passion Into a Business

Jenny continued working full-time as an office manager while building her cake business from home. Eventually, she had to make an important decision: Was cake decorating going to remain a side hustle, or could it become her full-time career?

Rather than making the leap without a plan, she began taking practical steps to establish her business. She created a dedicated Instagram account, obtained a business license, opened business bank accounts, and started learning about the financial side of entrepreneurship.

After approximately two and a half years of balancing her office job and cake orders, Jenny realized that her cake business was earning more than her full-time job. That gave her the information she needed to move forward with greater confidence.

Her story is a reminder that turning a hobby into a business involves more than being talented at what you do. It also requires evaluating your finances, understanding your goals, and making thoughtful decisions about your future.

The Business Side of Baking: Why Passion Isn’t Enough

Learning to Manage Money as a Bakery Owner

One of the biggest challenges Jenny faced when starting her business was learning how to manage money as a business owner.

When you work for someone else, many financial responsibilities are handled for you. When you own a business, however, you have to understand how to pay yourself, manage business expenses, account for taxes, and determine whether your business is actually profitable.

Pricing Your Cakes for Profit, Not Just Sales

Underpricing is a common challenge for cake decorators, especially when they're starting out from home. It's tempting to charge less to attract customers, gain experience, or compete with other bakeries. But custom cakes require significant time, skill, ingredients, equipment, and planning. If your prices don't account for those costs, you can end up working long hours without earning enough to sustain your business.

Jenny and Laura Kate discussed how underpricing can contribute to burnout. When you're constantly producing cakes but not making enough money to show for your work, it becomes difficult to keep going.

Building a profitable cake business means understanding your numbers and pricing your products accordingly. It may also means identifying your specialty and building your business around the products and services that make sense for you.

Treat Your Bakery Like a Business From the Beginning

One of the biggest lessons from Jenny's story is the importance of developing business skills alongside baking skills.

You can be an incredibly talented cake decorator and still struggle if you don't understand your finances, pricing, customer communication, and business operations.

Taking time to learn the business side of baking can help you make informed decisions as your order volume increases. It can also help you recognize when it's time to raise prices, hire help, or make changes to your business model.

Growing Beyond Your Home Kitchen

Recognizing When You've Reached Your Limit

As Jenny's cake business grew, she eventually reached a point where she was overwhelmed by the number of responsibilities she was managing.

She was making cakes, answering emails, preparing invoices, communicating with customers, and handling the administrative work required to keep the business running. Although she had created a successful business, she had also created a job that depended heavily on her doing everything herself.

Why Hiring Help Can Change Everything

Jenny hired an assistant who helped manage customer communication and administrative responsibilities. This freed up Jenny to focus more on cake production and other areas of the business.

Hiring help can feel intimidating for a small business owner, especially when you're used to doing everything yourself. However, delegating tasks can create room for growth and allow you to focus on the work that requires your particular skills.

The goal isn't necessarily to build a huge bakery team. It's to identify the responsibilities that consume your time and determine which ones someone else could handle.

Moving Into a Commercial Kitchen

In May 2021, Jenny moved her business from her home into a commercial kitchen.

The move was an exciting milestone, but it also introduced a new set of challenges. Commercial equipment, licensing requirements, taxes, inspections, and building regulations were all things she had to navigate.

The lesson? Before signing a lease or investing in renovations, investigate what your bakery space will actually need. Unexpected construction costs and regulatory requirements can quickly add to your startup expenses.

The Reality of Running a Bakery: Work, Family, and Time Management

Building a Business Around Your Life

Working from home gave Jenny a certain amount of flexibility. She could be available to her family while completing cake orders, even if that sometimes meant working late into the night.

Moving into a commercial kitchen changed that routine.

She had to establish more structured working hours, determine which days were best for baking, and figure out how much production she could realistically manage in a day. Her family also had to adjust to her being away from home during working hours.

There were challenges, but there were benefits, too. For bakery owners who work from home, opening a commercial kitchen can be a major lifestyle change. For others, staying home-based may be the right choice for their current needs.

Neither path is automatically better. What matters is understanding how each option affects your production capacity, finances, family life, and personal goals.

Why Systems and Scheduling Matter

As order volume increases, keeping everything in your head becomes more difficult.

Jenny uses written order lists and daily checklists alongside her computer-based systems.

This helps her and her team evaluate whether they can accept additional orders or need to bring in extra help. The number of orders alone doesn't tell the whole story. Production time, design complexity, delivery distance, and available staff all affect how much work a bakery can reasonably accept.

Creating systems for tracking orders and production schedules can help bakery owners make more informed decisions before their calendars become overloaded.

Learning to Set Boundaries as a Business Owner

One of the most difficult parts of owning a cake business is knowing when to say no.

It can be tempting to accept every order, especially when you're trying to grow your customer base. But taking on more work than your team can handle can lead to exhaustion, rushed production, and unnecessary stress.

A sustainable business isn't simply one that stays busy. It's one that can fulfill its commitments while allowing the owner and team to maintain a manageable workload.

Advice for Anyone Who Wants to Start a Cake Business

Start Before Everything Is Perfect

When asked what advice she would give someone who wants to start a cake business, Jenny emphasized simply getting started!

It's easy to spend so much time waiting for the perfect moment, the perfect equipment, or the perfect level of skill that you never take the first step. Jenny's own journey began with a homemade birthday cake. She learned new techniques as she went, took on paid orders, and gradually developed her business.

You don't have to know everything before you begin. You do, however, need to be willing to learn, evaluate your decisions, and improve as you gain experience.

Keep Learning and Challenge Yourself

Jenny also described how she regularly evaluates her work and looks for ways to improve.

If a technique doesn't turn out the way she wants, she thinks about what she could do differently. That willingness to keep refining her skills has been an important part of her development as a cake decorator.

Building a cake business requires continuous learning, both in the kitchen and outside it.

You may need to improve your decorating techniques, learn new equipment, understand financial reports, develop better customer communication systems, or discover how to manage a team.

Not every attempt will work perfectly. The key is to use those experiences to make more informed decisions the next time.

Learn From Mistakes Without Expecting Yourself to Know Everything

Even when you have experience in another profession, running a bakery introduces new challenges. You will make decisions with incomplete information, encounter unexpected expenses, and discover that certain processes need to change.

Instead of expecting yourself to get everything right on the first try, focus on learning from experience and building systems that help you improve.

What Does Growth Look Like for a Cake Business?

Building a Business That Doesn't Depend on You Doing Everything

As Jenny's business has expanded, her goals have started to shift. Rather than personally managing every event and class, she has begun allowing employees to take on more responsibilities.

That doesn't mean she wants to become an absent owner. Instead, she wants to remain involved while giving her team the training and responsibility they need to help the business run successfully.

Defining Success on Your Own Terms

There isn't one universal definition of success in the baking industry.

For some people, success means opening a commercial bakery and building a large team. For others, it means maintaining a home-based cake business that fits around family life.

Some bakers enjoy teaching classes, while others prefer focusing exclusively on custom cakes. Some want to expand into retail, and others prefer the flexibility of operating by appointment. The important thing is to evaluate opportunities in the context of your own goals, finances, and lifestyle.

Final Thoughts: From Batter to Business

Building a cake business is about so much more than baking and decorating. It requires financial knowledge, planning, customer communication, problem-solving, and the willingness to adapt as your business grows.

Jenny's journey from making her son's first birthday cake to running Jenny's Cake Creations offers a realistic look at what it takes to turn a creative passion into a business. Her experiences also show that growth doesn't happen all at once. It comes from making decisions, learning from challenges, and gradually building the skills and systems needed to move forward.

Whether you're just starting to sell cakes from home or you've been running a bakery for years, there are valuable lessons in her story: know your numbers, price your work appropriately, recognize your limits, and don't be afraid to ask for help.

Most importantly, remember that you don't have to have everything figured out before you begin. Start with what you know, keep learning, and build a business that works for you!

Want to hear the full conversation? Listen to From Batter to Business: What It Takes to Build A Cake Business to hear Jenny and Laura Kate, the owner of Sweet Stirrings, talk candidly about the challenges, surprises, and lessons that come with running a cake business.

If you're a baker or bakery owner, we'd love to know: What's one thing about running a cake business that surprised you the most? Share your experience and join the conversation!