The Surprise Email

A few weeks after the Ceramic Art London exhibition, I received an email from the Editor of Homes & Gardens magazine.  She had been a guest at the CAL exhibition, and had taken a photo of my cakes, and had contacted another business thinking my designs might suit their brand, and wanted to ask my permission to pass on my contact details to them.

Talk about out of the blue.  This I had never anticipated, at least not so early on in the business.  I know I've been baking for absolutely years, and making cakes for other people, but to do it for a business takes it to a whole new level.

So I received a lovely email from a lady at a high end soft furnishings and perfume store, who was interested in commissioning some of my 'gilded' cupcakes for a press launch they were holding in May, at their flagship store in Marylebone, London. to launch the updated packaging of one of their classic fragrances.

I suggested that I make them some samples, to have a look at what I did, and to give them a chance to tweak my designs.  I delivered these the following week, by hand, to their HQ in the W. Midlands.

They were delighted with the cakes, and asked me to provide packaging too.

The individual packaging they wanted was in the style of a transparent cube, with a pink base and holder.  The cakes were going to be on display for the launch, and then put in each cube, to be sent out in goodie bags for each member of the invited press.

The hardest part of this commission was finding the packaging.  You have no idea how hard it is to find such a simple package.  I was able to find the cubes, but the pink base was frankly impossible to track down in the UK, and the overseas stockists weren't prepared to ship it to me.

In times like this, you need to get creative, and it occurred to me that we could just try to make the inserts, instead of buying them readymade.

A trip to a local hobby store secured some sheets of thick grade, pink card stock, and a clever cutting tool like this one by EK Success

I designed a template, and we (dear boyfriend and I) made the box inserts.  A resounding success story, to a problem that had kept me awake for too many nights.

We delivered them, on time, to London, and treated ourselves to a well-earned coffee in a cute little Italian  cafe  just down the road from the store on Wigmore St.

Here's a picture the organiser of the launch sent me of their evening's soiree, and I got a hand written letter from their director saying how perfect the cakes had been a week later.

Don't the bottles and cakes just go perfectly together?

The First Commission

I have a very close friend who is a ceramic artist, and one of her professional friends asked if I could produce some cupcakes for her upcoming exhibition at the Ceramic Art London at the Royal College of Art.  So no pressure!

The brief was rococo design, rich colours, and 24 of them.  It took hours to ice them, but I was really pleased with how they turned out.

And here they are on display at the exhibition

And I found out only last month that the artist who commissioned them has kept a few in a box, because she loved them so much.

There was another chapter to this story though, so read on to the next post.....

The Flood from Heaven, and Happy Valentines!

Well, really it came from the bottom of our road, where the water treatment plant is for the local water authority. We awoke in late January to a completely flooded garden, and the water still rising.

Thankfully not too much damage was done, but I lost the entire contents of my greenhouse, and so I got a small payout from the water company.  I used part of the money to buy all of us new passports, which cost a small fortune, I might add, and the rest of the money bought this baby, who arrived on Valentines Day <3 :

I have to admit I did squeal when the delivery driver arrived with this one, and OMG! it's SO heavy.

What better to make on Valentines Day, than some cute little celebratory vanilla cupcakes:

Aww, I do like a romantic ending :o)

Catching Up

It's been an incredibly busy few months.

That seed of an idea I mentioned in my post on 1st January this year, has been well and truly planted, nurtured, and is well and truly flourishing.

So, initially I considered taking over the running of a tea room in our local town, but then a few weeks later I discovered that a high street coffee house chain was opening opposite it (they costalot ;-) ).  That made my decision for me, not to pursue that idea.

In the meantime my niece had contacted me about a mum at her school starting her own baking business, had handed out leaflets at the school, and in my niece's words 'is nowhere near as good as you... why aren't you doing this?'

So I did!  I'll make a few more posts to fill in the gaps of the past few months, with pictures to show what I've been doing.