How I Price My Cookies & How Long an Order Takes

hey everyone it's Stephanie from littlecookieko come join me as I walk you through my process of how I do a set of cookies [Music] so we start off by baking our cookies so I always plan to do this about a Sunday evening maybe Monday depending on how many cookies I have to do this set is actually 60 cookies it was for an engagement party for a close family friend so I usually bake for the week on Sunday nights it's kind of you know a day off for me off my day job at the end I'll share how long it actually took me for this whole order from start to finish and I'll give you some tips on pricing and how much I would have made if I did charge for these cookies so first things first is I have to know how many cookies I'm gonna make how many my batch usually makes and kind of plan my time out in advance so here it's Sunday I'm baking my cookies it's my least favorite part you know making the dough and rolling the cookies so I like to do an advanced not to stress myself out for the week so this batch was a little bit different because it was 60 cookies and I had a feeling that my double batch of dough that I normally make wouldn't be enough so I give myself an extra Jade just in case that if I had to make another batch of dough I would still have time so normally I make a double batch because I would rather have extra dough than not enough because I find it takes a long time to make the dough especially roll it out so rather do that all in one shot then break it up and have to do you know two single batches one back to back or you know one night one batch and then the next night the next batch is a while since I've done a big set like this and so I wanted to make it really special and I always plan to make one or two extra cookies sometimes when I get down to it and get decorating and everything goes well I might not decorate it those one or two last cookies but I always like to bake a few extra just in case I have any mishaps or you know you drop one or you break one or something happens down the line or you always have a test cookie too to make sure that the dough and everything tastes fine especially if you're giving in to clients so a couple of tricks that I learned along the way that helped me save some time was to get bigger cookie sheets to bake on I used to have smaller sheets that could only fit maybe about nine cookies or so and just having bigger ones that could fit 12 or more cookies it really really saves a lot of time I could have squeezed a lot more this is the first batch and I figured you know what I don't have time to like bake you know 10 to 15 minutes each tray so I ended up doing squishing a lot more on the tray and then it went a little bit faster which was great oh [Music] so unfortunately I ran out of dough and I didn't have enough to make all the cookies so the second night I did actually have to remake a little bit of dough and cut some more cookies and bake them but we're gonna count that as one day because normally I can do most of them in one night [Music] after I bake my cookies I usually either like to put them in a container or I like to put them in Ziploc freezer bags and it kind of just keeps them fresh overnight of course you want to make sure they're cooled completely before you do that foreign [Music] so here we are it's Tuesday night now we're awaking Icing at nine o'clock at night so again I like to always do baking one day and icing another day it really is up to you the way you do it but I find this with my schedule it works the best and I decorate the best when everybody's asleep and I have a quiet and nobody's kind of talking disturbing me running around the house so this is kind of the way that I work you kind of just find your Zone and go with it so making the actual icing doesn't take too long that's the easy part the hard part is coloring and making the consistencies so thankfully I didn't have to color this icing they wanted it white which is great but I did take a while to make the consistency it took me about 45 minutes to get the right consistency because I did a lot of flood at one time and so I kept having to add water and I don't want to over water my icing when I'm making my floods so I always have to put a little bit at a time so it does take a process of mixing it in seeing how it is how much more water I can add it does take a long time if you have to make several colors and you know several consistencies of those colors or you have to make flooding you know three four five colors that also takes a really long time it's taking me you know two three hours to get all my consistencies ready um that is something that you need to factor in when you're decorating as well is how many colors you're doing how many consistencies you need if you're writing and you're flooding and you're doing flowers or you know certain details that needle to stiffer icing and outline or blood and even though I've done this so many times there's no real way to speed it up I kind of just eyeball it and go with it but when I'm making multiple colors I'll let them sit on the counter the bubbles rise and so it kind of works out the way I do it [Music] and here you go I have this huge bowl of icing I put most of my icing in here to make the flood because I know I need a lot and I was hoping that this batch would cover all the cookies and luckily it did so that was a good sign [Music] so continuing on my Tuesday night here after I made my consistencies my goal is to outline all my cookies and flood them so again it's only one color so it's nice and simple same shape same design which is kind of good because it's all going quickly you know exactly what you need to do so I'm just getting my bags ready and everything ready to go if I can get this done all in one night then that's great and it sets me up good for the next day foreign [Music] make sure to test your icing on a paper towel see if the tip is good enough for you if you need to cut it a little bigger if I cut it too big so here I just have my cookies they don't nice and evenly these are my dehydrator trays just little gray trays they're plastic I use my dehydrator to dry my cookies faster so here I just have them set up I have two rows kind of facing downwards and then the other row facing the other way because I'll flip my tray halfway through because it's kind of hard to reach over to the top cookie sometimes I get my hand you know in the icing and I'll mess up my outline or my flood so I kind of like to face them one way some people can decorate designs upside down it doesn't really matter which way you go but for some reason it just with these Hearts it's easier when it's facing me so again if you don't have a dehydrator tray or something like this before I had one I used to decorate them on cookie sheets or on the cooling racks as well and when I was a beginner I used to do one by one so I would take one cookie put it in front of me slowly outline it put it back when I was done all the outlines again I would take the cookie you know bring it towards me flood the cookie put it back on the cooling rack and then take the next one but when you're doing a really big sets sometimes it's a lot more time consuming to do one by one so laying them all out on the tray like this really helps to go faster it does take some practice because you're you know if you're used to piping really close to your body or kind of having your head above the cookies and you're piping a little bit further away it's a little bit different awkward so if you get used to it but it goes a lot faster because you can kind of do one by one make sure you build that into your price if you're really really you know putting a lot of effort into it make sure you're charging your worth for your cookies you know if you're doing this as a business try to make sure you factor those things into your prices [Music] foreign so my goal is once everything's all outlined I always let my outline dry and then I go in and flat and same thing I'm starting with the middle row here it's just easier to start from that row so I'm not getting in my way and just one at a time I just flood them I keep them on the tray so I'm not moving things on and off and once I flooded the whole Trail carefully put it back in the dehydrator we don't want to start moving it too much because the first few cookies will probably start already drying a little bit this consistency is actually a little bit thicker than I normally use and I actually had to go in and use my scribe on every single cookie to make sure that that consistency melts in together now normally my floods kind of melt by themselves I don't really have to use my scribe but because I was kind of rushing this and I had so many I was doing at the same time I really didn't want them to spill over the side because sometimes when I make my fud a little bit looser they tend to spill over the edge if I put too much so I wanted them nice and thick layer of icing but without spilling over so I made it a bit on the thicker side but again to save time when you're doing orders if you have multiple orders then you kind of want to make sure that your flood's a little bit looser and it will settle on its own that way you don't have to take that extra 30 seconds 45 seconds on each cookie to smooth out your flat all those little things kind of add up on your time and so these little tricks will make it easier and faster if you're starting up your business or you want to make more cookies during the week and all those little tricks save you lots of time in the end when you're doing you know 50 or 100 or more cookies a week so here I'm just breaking left to right and I started kind of in that middle row and then working down to the bottom corner trying not to get my hands smudging any of the cookie icing and then I'll flip the tray and I'll do those top ones that I left before and this is much faster than like I said when I usually take one cookie at a time and do it that way so and so in goes one tray it's done into my dehydrator and on to the next so that's nine cookies down flooded bunch more to go so to speed up also the drying process you can use a fan as well if you don't have a dehydrator found a great way again it's a trick that I used before I bought one and it works to speed up the drying process so if you want to do the next steps you can go ahead and do it you know sooner than you would have to just wait for it to air dry make sure your fan setting is not too high because you don't want to blow the icing and kind of move it I might end up drying ripply so just put in a low setting kind of nearby your cookies just to get some airflow and that's all you need thank you [Music] this is day three and now we're going to work on the details now because this is only simple one color just writing I'm going to try and do them all in one night but normally like to give myself two maybe three days for details if there's lots of layers or different colors to do so in my head when I was kind of planning this I was like yeah no problem you know I like writing it's pretty quick do a couple practice runs it's all the same you know writing on each cookie should go pretty smooth and pretty quick never does so it took a lot longer than I actually planned for in case you're looking for the projector I'm using super easy and quick to use I'll leave the link in the description below the video just finding the right font took an hour or more maybe but I kind of had a specific font that they wanted so I had to make sure that I could find that font because the cookie that they showed or the example that they showed wasn't the right letters and so it took me a while and playing around you know cutting and pasting a little bit um to get the letters kind of in the right spot with the heart so all in all it took about an hour and a half to find the right font and to get my font kind of in the right spots with the heart and the right distance between this kind of pressure piping writing so it takes a little bit longer I need to go nice and slow and I really didn't want to mess up I really wanted to make this detail perfect so I took my time with it and the writing actually took me four and a half hours for 60 cookies because this is thicker icing and by the time I got done 62 cookies over four hours most of the cookie writing was dry by the end of it I could paint the little heart a champagne color and that took about 30 minutes that one pretty quick because it's just a minor detail and it was pretty simple to paint again I just laid them all out on my tray and I painted it all at once and it was super fast versus when I'm writing I'm doing one cookie at a time because I have to put them under the projector that had to be done one by one so that was kind of the long process and then the painting was just kind of nice and quick and that was the end of my Wednesday night [Music] and this is Packaging now I always like to package one day before pickup because I just want everything to be ready usually pickups for my order will happen on you know the Friday night or Saturday morning most the events were held on Saturdays so some people didn't want to come the mornings the day before is much easier for them to set up so here I wanted to bag everything today so that one tomorrow one is picked up everything was ready it didn't have to stress and I was happy and if anything goes wrong I always have a little bit of time to fix anything if something didn't work out like the I ran out of ribbon I can get some more or something you know just sometimes things happen last minute and it's better to give yourself more time I'm not worried about the freshness because once they're in bags too it's no problem it's heat sealed it's nice and fresh they've only been out for a few days the other days they were in containers or Ziploc bags or they're in these bags that I give to the client so the cookies stay nice and fresh so bagging is pretty quick I put them in the middle make sure sometimes you know the cookies go and crooked so you gotta fix it up a little bit but overall heat sealing is not that time consuming but tying ribbons definitely is so tying ribbons and bagging 60 cookies took me about three and a half hours a lot longer than I thought but if you can watch a TV show or put something on your phone watch my YouTube tutorials that's always a great way to kind of pass the time while you're doing things like this and you can buy pre-tied bows like on Amazon or other stores [Music] so I've kind of let you know how long each process has taken me so any guesses on how long it took me in total well if you guessed almost 20 hours you'd be correct which means that's about three cookies per hour so if you think about it if I'm charging three dollars a cookie I'm making nine dollars an hour where I'm from minimum wage is almost 17 an hour so three dollars a cookie is not making very much money especially considering I have to pay for my supplies and my ingredients as well so there's a lot of things that go into factoring the pricing of your cookies and how much detail and if you're going to be bagging them and doing all the extra steps so make sure you factor those into your prices and of course it depends on your area as well what the prices are how much people usually pay you know what the standard cost is for things as well [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] I hope you enjoyed the process everyone loved the cookies so I hope you guys also love the video and we'll see you in the next one happy baking [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] thank you foreign [Music]

Channel: Little Cookie Co

Views: 93,958

Keywords: decorated cookies, royal icing, cookie price, pricing cookies, how much to charge

Id: Bi0OEYGUivE

Length: 17min 49sec (1069 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 11 2023