hi all!!

I know this question has probably been previously answered, and I have tried Rose’s method in the Cake Bible…but, I want to scale my basic cupcake recipes to make say, 300-400 cupcakes, or my cookie recipes to make same, about 300-400 cookies. I might need to do bigger catering jobs soon (hopefully), and people love our recipes we have been using which are just single home batches.
I also want to scale up my frosting recipes.

I have been searching the Internet, I am wondering if any books are very specific about this (culinary textbooks perhaps?) or specific websites. any help is super appreciated!! 

thanks so much!
Miriam

If you’re not chaning the size of the pans— just the quanitity of batter—and your mixer can handle it, I think you should be able to simply scale succcessfly with no adjustments.  Keep in mind that if you’re baking in batches (rather than all at once) that you will want to have FILLED pans waiting to go in the oven, not a bowl of batter, because the leavening is acting, and you don’t wan tto crab its structural daring-do.  Also, keep filled pans in the fridge (they may take a little longer to bake).  If you keep the counter, they will expel leavening and you will get rounder tops.

The only place you might run into a bit of a snag is, for example, making frosting or other items that require part of it to be brought to a specific temperature.  For example, it might be hard to pour a massive amount of sugar syrup, pencil thin, into a vat of egg whites successfully, or to beat a huge quantity of egg over heat to the volume required for a genoise.  I’ve tripled neoclassic and mousseline without any problems, but I haven’t tried anything further than that.

What Anne says: You would want to have enough pans to bake that many at one time, and enough oven space as well.  What size mixer do you have? How much oven space do you have?

Having said that, our biggest single cupcake order this holiday season was for 2,500 mini cupcakes.  When I moved into my new space last fall, I bought a new double stacked Blodgett convection oven.  Even with five racks in each oven, and 10 pans of 24 each, the most I could bake at a single time was 240 cupcakes.  And then I had to consider that while the cupcakes were cooling, I couldn’t just put another 10 pans in the oven because I only had 8 pans of 24 to begin with.  So I bought 12 more pans (and they weren’t cheap.  I fussed about it for days - $684 on mini cupcake pans! seriously? I could have spent that easily on so many other things I want for the bakery!).  It took 3 solid days of baking to get that order done.  In addition to all the other stuff we had going on that week.

So you want to consider that although you might get an order or have multiple orders which call for 400 cupcakes (and during wedding season, it’s not unusual for that to happen on a weekend.  Two weddings of 200 people and you’re there.) you are going to make batches of batter and bake off as many as you have pans for, so you might only need to scale it up by a factor of 4 to make 100 at a time. 

For a 20 quart, the biggest batch size for an Italian Meringue buttercream uses 6 pounds of butter.  In school, there was an 80 quart mixer that could handle something like 25 pounds of butter, I think.  It was enough for 8 three tier weddings cakes to be filled and finished - that’s all I can remember!