If you are going to start a cake decorating business as a professional, its best that you get a Certificate in Food Hygiene. There are many online colleges and universities, you can start a part-time course.

If you can afford it, hire a professional photographer to photograph your cakes. Displayed in an album (together with any certificates you have) they give potential customers confidence in your ability.

Investing in a large food mixer would be beneficial and good quality baking tins. Cheap tins tend to bend when full of mixture, and (as the metal is thin) cakes that take a long time to cook, can burn on the outside. Novelty tins can be hired. These are much easier to use than trying to cut shapes out from cake, as the result can be - crumbs everywhere!

It pays to use the best quality ingredients, customers eventually forget the price of the cake, but they always remember the taste. It goes without saying there is no alternative for butter. Buy dried fruit as needed, when it is nice and plump - it shrivels with age. Eggs also deteriorate. Purchase organic eggs well within the date stamp.

An old cry amongst cake decorators is that they don't receive sufficient payment for time they put in. For instance, making sugar flowers, can take days and days ...and then some more. One way of letting customers know how costly the ingredients and sundries are, is to have a printed sheet for each order. Whether small ingredients, such as,lemons, apricot puree, baking parchment, and the cost of heating are included, is up to each individual. However, the main items should be listed, for instance, marzipan is extremely expensive, and the cost of butter for a three-tiered wedding cake will not be cheap. Then there are the cake boards, cake boxes, pillars, tins (if hired), marzipan, sugar paste, flower paste. It is amazing how quickly the costs mount - and that is before the labor cost is added.

The time taken is worked out in different ways. Sometimes it is as high as the market will pay! But that is for the 'big boys'. Another method is to add together the cost of ingredients, then double it. But this is not enough, as depending on the design, it can take just as long to decorate a sponge cake as it can a fruit cake, but the ingredients would not cost so much. Don't undersell yourself. You may get flooded with orders, but by charging a more competitive rate (although the phone may not ring so often) you will earn just as much without working yourself to a frazzle!

If an estimate for a wedding cake shocks a prospective customer, then following alternative may be of interest. High quality wedding cakes can be bought from various sources, either with the minimum of decoration, or in some cases, just the cake,leaving the decorator to make the final finish, with a resulting cut in costs.

And a last word. Professional cake decorators very rarely decorate other peoples' cakes.They know that even if 'Aunt Nancy' has offered to make the wedding cake, although it could be a high standard - there is a risk it may not be. And when guests ask" who make the wedding cake" your name will invariably be linked to it.