My Cake Decorating Checklist

Wondering what a cake decorating checklist is? In my post on my weekly routine as a cake decorator, I mentioned about having a cake decorating checklist.

This post is to explain what the checklist is all about and how it helps me organize my cake decorating activities. 

At one point, I was baking and decorating from home and it used to be a 'one-woman-show'. I used to shop, bake, decorate, deliver and clean up, all by myself. Having had to manage these activities effectively required a good deal of planning. To help me with the planning, besides my weekly routine schedule, I also had a cake decorating checklist. Though I do not do much decorating nowadays, I still use the checklist whenever I do bake and decorate and it really helps in ensuring all my supplies are in order before I embark on a decorating project.

The checklist is basically an inventory checklist and a shopping list which I use to check my stock at home and identify supplies that need to be replenished or newly purchased (for example a new cake tool to cater for a new design I was going to decorate). 

The first part of the cake decorating checklist focuses on common ingredients and supplies. This includes standard cake ingredients such as sugar, flour, butter and eggs. After the common ingredients, I will then list down all the supplies that are specific to the cake designs I am to complete in the coming weeks. For example, if I were to make a wedding cake with damask design and gumpaste hydrangeas, my list will include supplies such as gumpaste, floral wire, floral tape, hydrangea petal cutters and damask stencil (if I do not already own these), etc.

The whole idea of having this cake decorating checklist is to make sure all the necessary supplies and ingredients are in stock in the required quantities before starting on a cake project. It is very disrupting and a waste of time to realize an ingredient not sufficient half way through the process, especially when working on a tight deadline. 

This is how I organize my cake decorating checklist:

Assuming I have to make the following cake in 2 weeks' time. Customers choice of cake is vanilla butter pound cake with vanilla buttercream filling.

After designing and deciding on the cake size,  I calculated the amount of cake batter required and decided that it would be 1.5 times of an 8 inches square butter pound cake. I start my list but putting down all the cake ingredients needed: 

If you notice the list above, I plan to buy more than what I need of butter, sugar and flour. This is simply because I use this ingredients very often and I would like stock up a bit more than what I need for the current order. Same goes for eggs, I always buy more than what is required, but not too many as I prefer to use fresh eggs for my cakes. For the rest of the ingredients, I need not replenish them as yet as the stock in hand is still enough for quite a number of cakes.

Next, I will be adding to the cake decorating checklist, the icing ingredients. For this cake, I estimate about 3 batches of my buttercream icing recipe:

Again, I intend to purchase slightly more of butter and icing sugar than what is required. For butter, since the stock available at home is only 500gm and I have taken that into account for my cake ingredients, I reflect the quantity in stock for the butter cream icing as nil. 

The next items to go into my cake decorating list are common supplies. These items are required for all my orders, so this listing is fixed. Only changes will be to the color variants.

The last items to go into my cake decorating list are all those which are specific to this cake design. Based on the picture above, I identified the following items specific to the design, and these will go into my list next:

• M&M candies
• Marshmallows
• Silver luster dust for wordings on cake
• Yellow and purple fondant for flowers (since there is very little of this colors on the cake, I will mix the required colors into my available white fondant instead of buying ready made ones)
• Flower plunger cutters