With the arrival of childrens week came a multitude of bad adoptive parents looking for the [Bad Example] achievement which requires you to eat a variety of bad foods in front of your orphan.
One of these being the delicious chocolate cake. Like most people I went to the AH to see what the cooks of Azeroth were charging for the cake and found that the prices ranged from 60G at the start of the event to 25g 3 days later. I then priced up the individual ingredients on the AH and found that buying everything myself and cooking it would cost me 27g, so I bought an already made cake and watched my starving orphan cry as I ate it in front of him.
\"cake Recipe\"
A short while later curiosity got the better of me and I wanted to know just how much profit people were making from these 25g cakes. The answer was "a lot", (I'll show the figures later). The two main reasons these cakes were being sold at such a mark-up was that:
1 - Not everyone had the cake recipe which is a somewhat rare drop from the Outland cooking quest.
2 - People are too lazy to fly to each of the vendors to pick up the ingredients themselves.
The two ingredients that aren't sold by vendors were the small eggs and the Mageroyal. The small eggs however proved very easy to collect as there are mobs that have a 100% chance of dropping 1-2 at a time and are only level 6. The Mageroyal however proved to be a bit of a pain as I don't have herbalism and therefore would have to pay the overinflated prices on the AH.
So if making one cake yourself wasn't worth the time, maybe making them in bulk is? I wasn't too sure of the demand for the cakes this far into the event so decided to just make 10. Flying around and getting all the ingredients (including killing about 60 mobs for the eggs) took roughly 40 minutes. I've listed what I paid for all the items below:
8x10 simple flour = 20s (25b each)
4x10 ice cold milk = 50s (1s25b each)
4x10 mild spices = 4s (10b each)
8x10 small egg = free (15-20 minutes killing mobs)
1x10 flask of port = 15s (1s 50b each)
3x10 Mageroyal = 93g (bought on AH for an average price of 3.1g)
In total it cost me 93G 89S to make 10 cakes, at 25g they were the cheapest on the AH and within 24 hours 8 of them had sold. Once the other 2 sell I'll have made 237.5g (250g-5% AH cut) whilst using 93.89g of raw goods which gives me a profit of 143.61G for 45 minutes work. This equates to an hourly earning rate of 180G/hr
Not bad, but far from good. However there is a big lesson to be learnt here about getting in on things early. I did this experiment 3-4 days after the children's week event had started. Imagine if I had planned this a week before the start and aimed at being a big supplier. I would have been able to buy Mageroyal at its regular price (roughly 80s) instead of the 3g+ price it shot up to this week. Making 20 or 30 cakes would only take a slightly longer time (45-50 minutes). I would also have been able to start selling the cakes as the event started for the much higher price of 60G. If everything goes right a well prepared cook would be able to make 1000g-1800g for an hours work if he has planned well ahead, whilst the Johnny come lately's have to make do with their 180g/hr.
Chocolate Cake in Childrens Week
Thomas Urban writes weekly WoW gold making guides for http://www.eurogr.com