Ice Cream CakesBy Steve ReppucciAn Article for “The Scoop”

Adding ice cream cakes to your menu can be a great way to increase your off season business. In fact, it's a great way to increase your bottom line year round, as people buy cakes for all kinds of special occasions, both during peak ice cream eating season and through the slower winter months.

In this article, I'll cover some of the logistics involved in selling ice cream cakes. I'll try to save the “nuts and bolts” descriptions of actually making ice cream cakes for a later article.

Displaying Your Cakes

When deciding to add ice cream cakes to your menu, it's important to consider how you'll display your cakes to your customers. We all know that “seeing sells”, so you'll need to find the right way to show your customers how great your cakes are. Asking them to buy on faith that you'll make a beautiful cake probably won't work!

Ideally, you want to have an indoor area with a glass door display freezer or reach in merchandising freezer. If you have room for this, you'll want to always have five or more cakes pre-made and store them in either windowed cake boxes or clear cake domes so that the decorated cakes can be seen easily by visitors. Custom colored cake boxes are available online, so you can get boxes that match your store décor or logo, see the Resources at the end for sources.

If you don't have room for a freezer display case, consider decorating a few “fake cakes” – styrofoam blanks decorated with special frosting that will stay fresh looking for months, even at room temperature. There's a commercial product called “Perma-Ice” made especially for this purpose, but I've heard of others who used either Royal icing or even simple light-weight wall spackling compound (available at Home Depot.) You should be able to color this just like frosting, and use it to decorate your styrofoam cakes.

Having your decorated cakes on display is a marvelous marketing tool, as customers will see them and often be reminded of an upcoming birthday, anniversary, or baby shower and buy or order a cake on the spot.

If you don't have an indoor space for a display case, don't despair, you can still do a great job with pictures. Use your digital camera on its highest resolution setting to take pictures of your best cakes. If you have the budget to do so, you might even consider hiring a professional photographer to take these photos. Spending a couple of hundred dollars to get clean, crisp, professional looking shots of your cakes will help make your posters better, thereby helping you to sell more cakes.

Have your photos printed on large poster-sized prints. Staples, Kinkos, and many other online printing providers will do poster sized prints for well under $100. If you are handy with the computer, or have someone on your staff who is, you can design professional looking posters featuring an assortment of photos of your best cakes.

And don't forget your “virtual” store window – your website. If you want to build a great cake business, take photos of all of your best cake designs, publish them on a page of your website, and refer your customers to that page. We get a lot of orders with directions such as “Decorate it like photo #126 on your website.” You'll likely also want to print hard copies of those photos, and include them in an album that you keep at your store. Folks ordering cakes can then thumb through the album to get decoration ideas.

Equipment

Besides the display case and/or freezer space you'll need to store the cakes, you'll also want to equip yourself with some of the “tools of the trade”. Bowls, spatulas, decorating bags and tips are the obvious tools you'll need, and there's a long list of options here. I've included a list of recommended startup supplies, but don't feel that you have to purchase every single item on this list – what you need will be dictated by what you or your decorators prefer when it comes to making your cakes. Start with the minimum and add tools as you need them.

The biggest equipment choice decision is the type of mold you'll use. I obviously prefer Cold Molds flexible silicon molds, as I find that they're easier to use, last forever, and produce a better product. But many successfully use standard metal cake molds, both the rigid type and the spring release type. Molds are one of your biggest startup utensil expenses, and once you've invested in a collection of molds, you're likely going to stick with them for a long time, so do your research and choose the molds that will fit your business and give you the best chance of being successful.

For those unsure of the right choice, be aware that Cold Molds has a “Try Before You Buy” option on our website. Pick any three molds, and we'll ship them to you for free. If you think they're not right for your business, send them back within 30 days, and you won't be charged.

Sizes

Another key decision is what size cakes you'll be offering. You'll want to consider the available sizes of the molds you're going to use. I recommend that you resist the urge to offer too many sizes right away. If you offer a lot of different sizes you'll have customers waffling over which to order, and I think you'll find that many times customers will order one size, then call back later to change their order to another size – of course, after you've already started making their cake! And by limiting the number of choices, you limit the number of different molds, cake circles, boxes, etc. that you'll need to stock to support your cake business.

The type of ice cream you'll use to fill the blanks is a consideration in sizing as well. If you're

making high end cakes using ultra-premium ice cream or gelato, you may want to tend towards smaller sizes, as your slices are going to be more filling, and you want to try to keep the price of your cakes reasonably in line with your competition.

To start, I recommend that you offer two cake sizes. One should be targeted to feed 6 to 8 people, to appeal to small gatherings. The larger one should feed roughly 16 people. That'll cover the majority of the cake needs. I recommend that you choose two round cake sizes with roughly a 2 inch difference in diameter – either a 6” and an 8” mold, or a 7” and a 9” mold.

At my store, we offer 3” tall cakes. Our small cake is 6” diameter, and our large cake is 8”. We also offer a quarter sheet cake (9” x 13” x 2” tall), but we only make this size to fulfill customer orders, as I find very few people will walk in off the street to buy a sheet cake. If we make them in advance they tend to linger in the display case!

One last word on sizing: Many customers will ask “How many does it feed?”, to which I usually reply “Well, it depends -- are you feeding trike riders or truck drivers?” Obviously, if the cake is for a group of pre-school students, you'll be able to feed more than if it's for a group of burly men. Our 6” cake weighs in at around 40 ounces; our 8” at around 76 ounces. Cutting that 6” cake into 8 slices or the 8” cake into 16 slices yields roughly a 5 ounce portion, which is around where you want to be for a “normal” sized serving. Advise your customers to adjust the size of the cake they order based on who they're going to be feeding.

Preparation

Once you actually start selling cakes, preparing the cakes for sale is the major ongoing task that you need to allocate manpower to. Fortunately (or maybe unfortunately!) as all in the ice cream business know, there are plenty of periods of slower traffic throughout the day. Use your staff during these slower traffic times to pack and decorate cakes and you'll essentially be getting your cakes prepared for no additional cost, as you're paying those staff members to be there anyway!

It's likely that not every member of your serving team will have the artistic talent to decorate a cake for sale, but every member of your team should be trained on how to correctly pack cakes. The method you use to pack cakes will vary depending upon the type of molds you use and whether you make your own hard ice cream, purchase someone else's hard ice cream, or use soft serve product, but make certain that you have a clear, documented procedure for making your cake blanks, and that every single member of your serving team has been trained on and follows that procedure. Consistency is key, as you want your customers to know what to expect when they buy one of your cakes, whether you packed it yourself or it was packed by your most junior staff member.

At my store, all of our cakes are made with two layers of ice cream and a layer of fudge and chocolate “cake crunch” between the layers. Part of my standard training for new employees covers how to pack these, and my team members know that if a cake order comes in while

they are on duty, they are responsible for either getting the cake blank packed, or for handing the order off to someone on the following shift. If we're planning to make the requested ice cream flavor before the cake is due to go out, we'll try to pack our cakes right out of the batch freezer, but many of our custom ordered flavors get packed from the already hardened ice cream. (More on this process in the next article.)

One practical tip I'll offer here: Make sure to train your staff to label all of the cake blanks as they're filled. I like to cover the top of the blank with a piece of wax paper while it's hardening in the freezer, to protect it from both condensation and from drying out. On the wax paper, we write the flavors in the two layers that were packed. If the cake is being packed for a customer order, the customer name is written as well, otherwise we draw a star on it as an indicator that this blank is an available one that we're packing for display in our “grab and go” case.

When the blank gets removed from the mold, the wax paper gets removed, and the flavors and customer info gets written onto the underside of the cardboard cake circle that we're going to use to serve the cake on. Having the flavors on the underside makes identifying the cakes easy, even after the cake has been iced. Training your staff to always label their blanks will eliminate a big source of potential mistakes and angry customers.

Decorations

How to decorate your cakes is another marketing decision that you'll need to make, and there are some trade offs to consider.

You can make a cake that's simply the exposed ice cream blank, possibly decorated by drizzling the cake with fudge, caramel, or sprinkling the top and sides with sprinkles, toffee, oreo pieces, etc. Advantages of this method are that it's easy, fast, and can likely be taught to just about anyone on your staff. Disadvantages are that your cakes might not look as professional as the ice cream cakes your customers see at the supermarket, and the fact that any irregularities in the packed cake blank (air pockets where the ice cream didn't fill completely to the mold, inconsistent height of the two layers of ice cream, etc.) will be visible to your customers. Still, with a little patience and attention to detail during the cake packing stage, this can be a fine approach.

If you want your cakes to look more like the cakes you normally see in a bakery, you'll likely want to ice your cakes to give them a smooth, consistent, finished look. We use a white, vanilla pastry topping to ice our cakes, but many use freshly made or softened ice cream, buttercreme frosting, or soft-serve for this. If you're just getting started with cakes, experiment with the various icings available to you and see which product gives you the finish that you're looking for.

Many use a “cake comb” tool to comb the sides of the iced cake. This gives the cake an interesting texture, and helps to mask some of the irregularities if you aren't able to get your cake perfectly covered.

Icing a cake takes a little bit of skill, but it's not a difficult one to learn, and you should be able to train a good portion of your staff to be able to do an acceptable job icing a cake. Applying an icing layer both covers up any of those irregularities I wrote about previously and adds a layer of insulation to help keep the ice cream from melting, should you decide to decorate your cakes.

Once iced, you can sell your cakes as is, or you can add some decorations to make them stand out. We use a buttercreme frosting to do a simple border around the top and bottom edges of the cake. We use buttercreme because it produces clean, sharp decorations and will hold those sharp details even if the cake is left out at room temperature for a few minutes. In an emergency, we can tint the same pastry topping we use to ice the cake and use it for the decorations, but the resulting cake is much more susceptible to “melt down” if it's left out for too long before it's served.

Applying decorations is a skill that anyone can learn, though I think you'll find naturally artistic members of your staff who will do a better job than others. I can decorate one of our cakes, but the result isn't anywhere near as professional looking as those applied by my better decorators. In a pinch though, I can do it, and I explain to the customer that I'm not the greatest decorator, but that I'll try. Most are very appreciative of the effort, especially since it's normally in a situation where they're running around at the last moment trying to get a cake for their event!

Quick hint: While some of my decorators can make their own flowers, stars, etc., most can't. I like to keep an assortment of simple sugar decorations that can be added by anyone. The most popular are roses, daisies, stars, ice cream cones, animal heads, but there are decorations available for just about any theme. See the links at end of this article for sources.

Growing Decorators

If your cake business builds to the volume where you can hire people just to decorate cakes, that's a wonderful thing. But in the beginning you'll probably be relying on yourself or a few existing members of your staff to decorate your cakes during otherwise slow periods. While I've hired a few people specifically as decorators, I think my most successful decorators have been those who've learned on the job – I like to think that we helped them “grow” into the role!

I find that many of my serving team are interested in trying their hand at decorating cakes, as

it is a nice change of pace from the stress of dealing with demanding customers! Once you have a core group who are skilled at decorating, they can teach others the techniques needed to make great looking ice cream cakes.

During slow traffic times, I encourage my less experienced staff to “play” a bit by trying their hand at decorating a cake – usually with one of my experienced decorators watching over their shoulder, coaching them through the techniques. This is a good way to discover those with the talent to decorate on a regular basis. If they completely mess up the decorations and I just don't think anyone will buy it, so what? We can always scrape off the sub-par decorations, and apply a new look that will sell.

I also encourage my staff to assemble and decorate cakes for their family or friends by offering them a 50% discount if they do so. This gives them a bit of practice on a cake that's not going to a customer. And nothing is a better motivation for them to try to refine their decorating skills than the thought that their family or friends are going to see (and critique) their work!

And one last tip: Many craft stores (e.g., Michael's) offer Wilton Cake Decorating courses. The cost is very reasonable (around $25) and the course teaches basic decorating techniques. I pick up the cost of this course for any of my staff who want to take the time to attend, as I figure that having another person with basic decorating knowledge can never hurt.

Ready Made Cakes

When I was still in the investigation stage of opening my ice cream business, one consultant told me that if I had a display case always filled with 10 available ice cream cakes, I'd sell on average about 10 cakes per day. But if I required customers to pre-order cakes, he warned, I'd be lucky to sell 10 cakes per week. While those numbers aren't 100% accurate, I think the percentages aren't far off.

While some customers will plan weeks ahead and order exactly the flavors and decorations they want for their cake, others want to stop by at the last minute, grab a cake from the freezer, and go. And if they can't do that at your store, they'll stop by the local supermarket and grab one there! I'd guess that around half of the cakes we sell are pre-orders. The rest are those that we've prepared ahead of time and have decorated, ready to go.

To cater to these last-minute shoppers, we try to keep an assortment of ready-to-go cakes in our display freezer or storage freezer. Since we make our own ice cream, I try to pack 5 to 10 cake blanks each time we make ice cream. When one of our decorators is working, they'll decorate the pre-orders first, then decorate whatever “display” cakes we have packed.

A couple of points to consider: Try to pack these display cakes using your most popular flavor combinations, so that they'll appeal to more potential buyers. We tend to do a lot of Chocolate + Vanilla, Chocolate + Oreo, and Vanilla + Strawberry, or Vanilla + Cookie Dough combinations at my location. On those occasions where someone has packed an odd

combination (Peppermint Stick + Black Raspberry, anyone?) for a display cake, I often end up donating it to a local charity group or discounting it to get it to move, as there are bound to be limited customers willing to try those odd flavor combinations.

Another point: Have your decorators decorate those display cakes in a somewhat neutral fashion, so that it can be adapted to whatever occasion with the addition of a few simple touches. We keep a selection of decorations (roses, ice cream cones, stars) on hand, so that we can turn a simple yellow bordered cake into a “Happy Birthday Mom” cake with the quick addition of a rose and some piping gel for the writing, or into a sports-themed cake by adding a few soccer balls or footballs to it.

Marketing

As you start your cake business, one challenge will be getting customers to know that you have ice cream cakes, and educating them as to why your cakes are better than those supermarket store cakes.

As an easy and inexpensive way to spread word of our cakes, we use requests for charitable donations as an opportunity to help build our cake business. When an organization asks us for a donation for their cause, our standard contribution is a gift certificate for one of our 8” cakes for them to raffle off. This gets the knowledge that we have ice cream cakes out to everyone who attends the fund raising event. Since we're donating product, rather than cash, our only out of pocket expense is the food cost (roughly $7 on a cake that retails for $26.) And that person who wins the certificate will talk about it, spreading word even further.

Don't forget to include a nice label with your store name and address on the box that the cake goes home in. Typically, a dozen or more people will be present when that cake gets served, and you want to make sure that they all know that it came from your store.

Many folks I talk to use a “Frequent Buyer” program for their cake customers, so that after buying 8 cakes, the 9th one is free. This is a great idea to encourage repeat business. One idea that I learned about at a past NEICRA convention (and that I'm embarrassed to admit that I haven't yet implemented!) is to keep the frequent buyer cards at the store for your customers. The “Frequent Buyer Card” then becomes just an index card, and you can make notes on the card as to what occasion each cake was purchased for. If it's a birthday or anniversary, then the following year you can mail out a postcard with a coupon reminding them of your cakes a few weeks beforehand. Brilliant idea!

You'll want to rachet up your marketing efforts a couple of weeks before the big cake buying days of the year – Mothers Day, Fathers Day, graduations, July 4th, Labor Day, and especially Thanksgiving. Our biggest cake week of the year is the week before Thanksgiving, when we'll sell a lot of cakes with seasonal fall flavors (Apple Pie and Pumpkin Gingersnap are our biggest sellers that week), though we'll also sell a lot of traditional Vanilla + Chocolate combinations. Consider running a newspaper ad or sending out an email blast to your

customer list to remind them to order a cake fore the upcoming holiday, etc.

Don't forget to hype the advantages of your cakes on your posters and other marketing materials. I like to tell customers that those supermarket cakes come in your choice of flavors – as long as your choice is either Chocolate or Vanilla! With one of our cakes, we can do just about any combination of flavors, so if the customer really did want that Salted Caramel + Pistachio cake with M&M's in the middle, then sure, we can do that! And, especially if you're selling a premium ice cream, make sure to stress the quality. Most supermarket cakes are made with the absolute cheapest product they can use and still call it “ice cream”.

Ordering

For those with the forethought to order ahead, you'll want to have an order form that explains the options available to them and records the customer's selections and any special requests. Our order form has fields for the customer's name and phone number (in case there's a question on the decorating directions), pick up date (and approximate time), cake size (we offer 5 different sizes) including the price, the ice cream flavors they wish packed in their cake, any preferred decoration colors, and an area for “special directions”.

We ask that customers place orders 48 hours before they need to pick up the cake. In an emergency, we've turned custom cakes around in as little as 2 hours, but you likely want to discourage that type of request, as some will come to rely on it. If you don't have a hardening freezer to freeze your cakes quickly, you may need to ask for more lead time, so that you can freeze the cake blank for 8 hours or more and still have time to schedule someone to apply the decorations.

Our standard decoration is a white frosting with a single color border. Although my decorators often add in additional details, that's what we promise on our order form, and we state that any additional decorating will be subject to a decorating charge. For simple decoration requests – drawing a butterfly, or an elephant, for example – we'll add a $5 decorating charge. For more complicated requests, we'll double or even triple that charge, depending upon how much time is needed to complete the decorating to the customer's desire.

Conclusion

Hopefully this article has given you a bit of information to help you get started selling ice cream cakes. Building a healthy cake business takes some time and planning, but in my opinion it's well worth the effort.

My original intent when I started this article was to cover all aspects of ice cream cakes, but there's so much information that I simply ran out of room. I'll hopefully have a follow up article in the next edition where I'll give some tips on the actual techniques for building cakes and decorating them.

If you have questions on anything in this article, please feel free to contact me by email at steve@coldmolds.com and I'll be happy to offer any additional help I can.

Resources

Sources of Cake Domes and Boxes: Big River Packaging: http://www.brpboxshop.com/The Webstaurant Store, http://www.webstaurantstore.com/

Cake Decorating Supplies:Bakery Crafts: http://www.bakerycrafts.com/Lucks: http://www.lucks.com/Pfeil & Holing: http://www.cakedeco.com/

Perma-Ice Frosting:http://www.bakingshop.com/cakes/permaice.htm