Baking Essentials List

In this post about baking essentials list, I am going to share with you a checklist that I use to help me organize my baking and decorating supplies. I mentioned this list in my other post here on my weekly routine as a cake decorator.

The list is basically a simple tool that helps me make sure all my essential baking supplies are consistently stocked. It also helps me avoid situations where I run out of ingredients halfway through a baking or decorating project.

Home Based Cake Business

At one point in my life, 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. Managing all these activities effectively required a good deal of planning. To help me with the planning, besides my weekly routine schedule, I also had a baking ingredients and baking essentials list. Even though I do not do much decorating nowadays, I still use the list whenever I bake and decorate as it really helps in ensuring all my supplies are in order before I embark on a decorating project.

The list is basically an inventory shopping list that 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). 

---

Baking Essentials List - Ingredients & Supplies

The first part of the baking essentials list focuses on common baking ingredients and supplies. This includes standard cake ingredients such as sugar, flour, butter, and eggs. After the common ingredients, I 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 gum paste hydrangeas, my list would include additional supplies such as gum paste, floral wire, floral tape, hydrangea petal cutters and damask stencil (if I do not already own these), etc.

The whole idea of having this 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 is not sufficient halfway through the process. This is more so when working on a tight deadline. 

---

How to Create an Effective Baking Essentials List

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

Cake ingredients list:

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

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 - -

The first and second columns are the list of ingredients and quantity I need for my project. The third column is the quantity of stock I have at home while the last column (which is highlighted) is the quantity I need to purchase.

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 these ingredients very often. And I would like to stock up a bit more than what I need for the current order. The 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.

Frosting ingredients list:

Next, I will be adding to the baking essentials list, the icing ingredients. For this cake, I estimated 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 in my cake ingredients, I reflect the quantity in stock for the buttercream icing as nil. 

Common essentials list:

The next items to go into my baking essentials list are common supplies. These items are required for all my orders, so this listing is fixed. Hence, the 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 ¼ tub 1 tub 1.5 meters ½  4 straws a few drops a few drops a few drops 1 1 4	0 2 tubs 0 ½ large tub 1 roll (4 meters) 10  50 straws available available available 0 15 50	1 - 1 tub - - - - - - - 1 - -

Specific tools and supplies list:

The last items to go into my baking essentials 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 the cake;
• Yellow and purple fondant for flowers (since there is very little of these colors on the cake, I will mix the required colors into my available white fondant instead of buying ready-made ones); and
• Flower plunger cutters

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 ¾ 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. Hence, I would need purple and yellow food colors. Therefore I put them down on my list.

And that's it. This is how I build and manage my baking essentials list. 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. 

Happy Baking 🙂