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.
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:
Cake Ingredients |
Quantity Required |
Quantity in Stock |
Quantity to be purchased |
Butter Castor sugar Self raising flour Salt Baking Powder Eggs Milk Vanilla essence |
900gm 900gm 900gm a pinch approx 2tsp 15 15tbsp 2.5tsp |
500gm 400gm 100gm approx 500g approx 100g 25 1 carton 2 bottles |
2kg 2kg 2kg - - 10 - - |
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:
Icing Ingredients |
Quantity Required |
Quantity in Stock |
Quantity to be purchased |
Butter Icing sugar Vanilla essence |
360g 360g 1.5tsp |
- 500g 2 bottles |
1kg 1kg - |
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.
Items |
Quantity Required |
Quantity Available |
Quantity to be purchased |
Cake boards - 15" square Fondant - pink - green - white Ribbon -pink Glue sticks Bubble tea straw Food coloring - pink -vert green -brown Cake boxes -15" square Cake knife Candles |
1 1 tub 1/4 tub 1 tub 1.5 meters 1/2 4 straws a few drops a few drops a few drops 1 1 4 |
0 2 tubs 0 1/2 large tub 1 roll (4 meters) 10 50 straws available available available 0 15 50 |
1 - 1 tub - - - - - - - 1 - - |
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:
Items |
Quantity Required |
Quantity Available |
Quantity to be purchased |
M&M candies Marshmallows Flower cutter Fondant -purple -yellow Food color - purple - yellow Silver luster dust |
2 packets 1 packet 1 (medium) 1 tbsp 1 tbsp a few drops a few drops 1 tsp |
0 0 1 set 0 0 1 bottle 0 3/4 of small jar |
2 packets 1 packet - - - - - 1 bottle - |
As mentioned above, since I only require a small amount of purple and yellow fondant, I choose not to purchase them in tubs. Instead, I decided to use white fondant (which is already in stock) and tint it purple and yellow. For this, I would need purple and yellow food colors and therefore I put them down in my list.
And that's it. This is how I build and manage my checklist. This is quite an extensive checklist but it helps me make sure all my supplies are ready at home before I start on my project.
Thank you for reading! Please leave your feedback or comments below and I will get back to you as soon as I can :) :)
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