Baking Business Boom: A feature on Ella Hargen’s baking business

Indian Hills eighth grader Ella Hargens sets down her backpack after a demanding day of hybrid learning and darts to the kitchen to put the ears and sprinkles on her freshly baked unicorn cake just in time for a six-year-old’s birthday party the next day.  

Along with advanced classes and dance team, Hargens manages her baking business under the Instagram username @ella_grace__bakes_, taking orders through direct messages and posting all of her cake creations. 

Hargens started the account last summer after she’d been baking for friends and neighbors during quarantine and continuously received cake requests. 

She started out by baking and decorating cupcakes using the piping bags her grandmother gave her for her eleventh birthday that she hadn’t broken into yet. Just one day after creating the baking account, she got her first cake request — a simple vanilla sheet cake for her friend’s mom’s birthday.

With increasing orders for kids’ birthday parties, Hargens began to get creative and experimented with complex superhero and unicorn cakes to parallel the party themes. 

“After I’d agreed to do my cousin’s cake, the requests kept coming in and within a couple days, I had about five kids’s birthday parties lined up to bake for,” Hargens said. 

The business was met with immense support from her family since she had something to keep busy and the added bonus of making money. They also didn’t mind being her go-to taste testers. 

In the span of eight months, she’s filled orders for around 30 events — all cakes and cupcakes intended to feed over 20 people. The majority of her revenue is put towards ingredients for her next order. 

“Our garage is stocked full of the giant Costco bags of powdered sugar because I’m always in need of more with the amount required for all the cakes,” Hargens said.

Pricing is also centered around the amount of time and labor Hargens puts into each creation. She asks that orders be placed one-to-two weeks prior to when the order needs to be fulfilled so that she can allot enough time in the week. 

“A parent once messaged me two days before they needed the cake and it was really awkward because there simply wasn’t enough time, and I had to tell her that I couldn’t make the cake for her kid’s birthday,” Hargens said. “Even though she was the one who gave short notice, I still felt so bad.” 

Usually she sets aside an entire day to complete a cake. She begins baking when she first wakes up in the morning, then lets it cool for an hour before she does the first layer of frosting, known as the crumb-coat. The cake cools for another hour before it’s ready to be completely iced. According to Hargens, the entire process takes a solid seven hours. 

According to Hargens, even though it can be a lot of work, seeing how excited the birthday boy or girl is to see their cake and how it brings the party theme together is worth all the time and energy she puts into baking. 

Timewise, remote schooling was ideal for baking because she’d have breaks in the day when she could create. Business has slowed down since the complete return to in-person school and she’s only had time to bake a couple cakes on the weekends.

Although Hargens plans on continuing to bake for friends and family as a hobby throughout high school, but doesn’t plan on pursuing a career in the culinary arts because it’s not her main interest. 

“It’s weird to think how at first it was just a little quarantine hobby, and now here I am with bins full of flour and powdered sugar stacked up in my garage,” Hargens said.