I'm scared speechless...amounts...samples...

I see requests on this forum every day for specific amounts of batter, icing, etc to use. Also questions about how to divide recipes.

It scares me speechless. It's so easy to make a mistake typing amounts, and if somebody then goes and follows that mistaken number, they are going to have a problem. Waste money, or run short, or the cake falls, or...you name it. Disaster comes in all sizes and shapes.

Please people--if you can't do such simple arithmetic, then you have no right to be taking somebody else's money for a cake. You should write down the information of how many cups of batter each cake recipe makes. Yes that means YOU measure the batter when you mix the cake (either in testing the recipe or once when you know it's a good recipe). Then you can use the posted tables to fill larger pans.

Or you do everything by weight. But you still have to divide and multiply weights to get the total ingredient list for a given cake project. And you still have to do this arithmetic correctly for the different pans.

And NO you don't just assume that somebody else has written the correct cups per recipe. NO you don't just download a recipe and bake a huge cake with it. NO people don't all use the same amounts of icing for the same sized cake...That should be commonsense.

If you want a small batch for samples, bake exactly the same recipe as your real cakes will be. Use some practical ingredient to do your arithmetic--divide the recipe:say by the number of eggs? Or just use a bunch of small pans...I mean, you will sometimes divide a large batch into several pans anyway, right? FYI You have a legal obligation to divide them into equal portions by weight for sale.

DO NOT USE A DIFFERENT RECIPE FOR SAMPLES THAN FOR YOUR SALE GOODS. Because that misrepresents your product and your business.

I don't want to make a mistake that will cost somebody else some money or a lot of grief.

The good recipes all say how much batter they make. The professional baking texts are the best because everything is by weight and you just scale it into the pans according to the published tables.

The Wilton icing recipes do say "makes xx cups" and they turn out for me pretty close to what they say. So you can use the Wilton table that people post links to every day for estimating the batches.

I am also trying to say that the foodservice mindset is priceless. in terms of not wasting ingredients and therefore making a profit.

There were a couple of people today alone who posted that they took an order for a wedding cake for 200+ people WITHOUT a recipe of their own. They asked for the exact details of how much icing their cake would need, they asked for recipes to fill their pans, they basically asked for somebody else to do their arithmetic for them. It has been happening on this forum just about every day.

At the same time there appears to be an error posted with a cake picture that somebody else wants to copy...an error that experience (or high school geometry) would catch and correct.

Here's MY problem: what if a response has a typo that costs some poor person $100??? I'm afraid of causing somebody else a problem that their inexperience will not catch in time.

And YES there was a person claiming to be employed in producing baked goods, that posted several times that they wanted a recipe from somebody else to make a tasting size of their own product. There have been other discussions about tasting samples, from people who know that they are supposed to offer the same product in the tasting size as the final cake. It was clear that this particular poster didn't understand that basic principle.

FYI you can set up your account to block all future posts from me. Then you won;t have to be disturbed.