Happy New Year!

One of the things I like about baking is that you can be very friendly and welcoming with so little bother. Our horrendously grumpy neighbour moved out just before Christmas (yay!) and to welcome the new couple to the neighbourhood I dropped in some mince pies and a card. To get to know them better we've invited them around for a cuppa and a cookies on New Year's Day.

20 minutes messing about in the kitchen and the house smells lovely. Miss B, now a grown up young lady of 6, deigned to help for a bit. It was mostly an excuse for nicking unbaked cookie dough in her case, but fun nevertheless. Anyway, it's so little real work, knocking up a couple of batches of biscuits.

And at the end of that bit of effort it's ace offering lovely warm cookies to our new neighbours. Baking for someone is such a nice way of saying Hello, or Welcome to our house. I also find people are much more forgiving of the mess you live in when they are distracted by fresh baked goods!

On the selfish side, I could also take the opportunity to play with recipes from the marvellous Dan Lepard book. I've had a lovely time reading it lately and was dying to have a go baking some of the recipes in it. The oatmeal and cherry cookies were delicious. I'd not got the dark chocolate and mint cookies quite right; I'll need to work on that.

Another happy baking time this holiday was when my very ace friend and her family came over for Miss B's birthday. I made a chocolate cake using Annie Bell's recipe (my old favourite) and then had a go at a pecan pie from Edd Kimber's book, using rum instead of bourbon.

We are all fans of When Harry met Sally, so the pie was greeted with many exclamations of being "Proud to partake of your pecan pie," (which we found funny for longer than was seemly.) The pie itself was utterly delicious.

I'd used the wrong pie dish - a quiche dish - and it stuck quite badly despite being greased before hand. It also couldn't accommodate nearly half of the syrup mix, which was such a waste. I found I needed more pecans to cover the top than the recipe called for, but that might have been down to the wrong size dish as well.

Despite this, the pie was gooey, crunchy and flavourful in all the right ways. It's taken us 4 days to eat it and every mouthful has been scrumptious.

Now I know what I did wrong I shall certainly be making it again soon!

Tomorrow I'm back to work, baking what needs baking rather than whatever takes my fancy. It's only a fortnight until I hit my 3rd anniversary of Cake Box, so I'd best get cracking.

Happy 2012

Back to reality

That was one hell of a holiday!

Florida was fantastic fun. I fed a dolphin! By hand! Stroked its chin and everything! I may need to use some more exclamation marks!!!! I was (and am) very excited about that.

I would calm down but I also need to tell you how truly awesome New York was as well. The kids managed to tear themselves away from playing on the Big piano at FAO Schwartz, riding the ferris wheel at ToysRUs and spending the year's pocket money at the Lego shop long enough to come with us to the Top of the Rock, to the glory that is MoMA, to the Natural History Museum (of Night at the Museum fame), to be wow-ed by the marvellous Hayden Planetarium (in the Rose centre, as featured in Spider-Man 2) and then around Central Park to look like extras from Enchanted. New York is like every film you can remember - "except dirtier and smellier" said my daughter.

We rode the Staten Island ferry, had lunch in Greenwich Village and visited the very lovely High Line Park. We saw the actual, original Winnie the Pooh and pals at the New York Library's Children's centre. (Said library appear in Ghostbusters, in case you were interested). The whole trip was about this good - !!!!!!!!!!!
Aren't you glad I saved all those exclamation marks for one little outburst?

Anyway, horrid jetlag and messy unpacking aside, I was straight back to work. It's not been too busy, thankfully. I need to get my body clock sorted before I embark on a major bake-a-thon.

I am inspired to try things based on the cakes and baked goods I sampled in the US. Candy apples - who knew? Apparently they're the new Big Thing. Whoopie pies and cake pops seem to have pretty much disappeared, cupcakes are still very popular despite 5 years of articles in the foodie press claiming they are SO over every couple of months. Tiny little portions of things were very popular too - mini cakes, 'bitty bites' and so on.

I went a little bit mental in the sprinkles store again. How is it possible to spend £120 on sprinkles? I am clearly a nut, but it was all so very tempting. I could have happily spent hundreds of pounds if only I could get it all home again. Still, my customers will get some very fabulous looking cupcakes and when I run out I have a great excuse to slope off to NYC again.

I feel so lucky to come back just before two long weekends and some astonishingly gorgeous weather. It makes it so hard to stay in the kitchen, it's true, but it does make life feel so much more pleasant.

On the down side, my fabulous son has had a tough week, our house is a total tip because we are still in the middle of decorating and have nowhere to actually PUT the clothes we're unpacking, Buffy the lovely hen and Lola our favourite guinea pig died while we were away, both were very young and it was very sad.

Looking at positives, we now own Amy Pond, Donna, Martha, Sarah Jane Smith, Leela and Ace the new chickens and Doctor Who returns to the telly this weekend. As the 11th Doctor might say, Hens are cool.

And so are cakes.

The final push

I'm going on holiday. An actual away-from-the-oven holiday. Soon. If I can last that long, which is in no way a sure thing.

My business has several different types of customers. I have a bunch of private commissions, where someone rings and requests a cake for a specific date. Easy peasy, I just tell them I'm unable to take the commission for that period. I have the Cake Box Club customers, who get a mixed box of lovely things once a month: again, I can schedule that to suit myself. And I have two wholesale customers who have regular weekly orders to sell on to their customers. And therein lies the tricky bit.

They still need cake to sell. I've tested every one of my products so I know which cakes freeze well and which don't - a freshly baked cake, frozen, is still very nice when defrosted - so as long as I can bake enough cake/cupcakes/biscuits to tide them over, they will have stock to sell. But I work pretty flat out most weeks. How can I fit in an extra fortnight's work in at the last minute?

(It is a truth of clients that they want the freshest possible cakes at the last possible second)

In order to fulfil this, I have been baking like a woman possessed for the past 5 days. Yesterday I made 15 chocolate cakes and 90 scones. Today I baked 7 cakes and 250 iced gingerbread men. It's been a bit manic.

Unfortunately, I managed to get a chest infection as well, so I've been a bit unwell. This has added to the strain somewhat. My knees ache because I've been on my feet for so many hours in a row and I'm not sleeping well because my endless coughing keeps waking me up. And of course there's all the stuff that needs doing in order to facilitate a family holiday.
Much of that seems to be paperwork or laundry. Laundry, like the poor, is always with us.

Mark keeps telling me that self employed people don't get to take holidays. (It's remarkable that he doesn't get the odd smack about the chops, isn't it. I am a shining example of self restraint.) I know LOADS of self employed people. Most of them take holidays. Surely it's possible if you just plan enough and slog through the tricky bit.

Anyway, I'm not quite at the finishing line but I reckon I can see it from here. And it is a sunny, gorgeous finish line.

If I make it, I promise to send you a post card!

Quick update - I did it! I'm so immensely relieved and a bit giddy with excitement.

A well-earned break

I've had a lovely Christmas and a riotous New year. I hope you have too.

Life over the last few weeks had been a bit of a challenge. Nothing awful, everything was self-inflicted but I'm glad they are behind me.

After speaking to several loft conversions companies we selected the one we were happiest with and gave them the go ahead. They had a slot in late Feb (sounded fine to me) or one starting the next week. I was all for the late Feb slot - we had loads of decisions to make, the loft was full to the rafters with stuff, the mortgage was only just agrees, I was very busy with work and Christmas was swift approaching.

Loft bloke Carl offered £500 off the quote plus the extra plug points in the bedroom and the larger windows I'd asked him to quote for. My lovely parents offered to loan us the money until the mortgage came through and Mark pointed out £500 was an awful lot of cake I wouldn't have to bake to pay for it. So I rashly agreed.

The guys have been very nice and are decent blokes but it is still noise, mess (LOTS of mess) and disruption. This isn't that bad for people who can leave the house but as i was working 10 or more hours a day I was stuck with it. They worked 7 days a week and I am thoroughly sick of having workmen galumphing through the place now.

They've stopped for the holidays and are so very nearly finished that it's a bit frustrating. However, it looks a super job and I know it will all be worth it once we've got the decorating done.

Another advantage to having the loft room built sooner rather than later is the kids will have a room each that much sooner. Miss B and Z are sharing. Poor Z is clearly getting a raw deal as B wakes him up, is messy and bossy and roundly abuses him whenever she's in a strop about something and poor Z can't escape. He needs some space (and I need less brawling!)

The other part of the self-inflicted challenge was my workload. This year I sold 38 Christmas cakes and turned down another 7 because I was just too busy. I did several birthday cakes, including another couple of that very popular Hello Kitty cake and I had a stall at the PTA's Christmas shopping evening.

The stall was an experiment. I had great fun with it, could have sold more than double the number of cupcakes I took, and got some Christmas cake orders and a cake box subscriber as well. I think I'd do it again, although partly because it was fun rather than because it was hugely profitable once you'd taken the PTA's cut into account.

As a result of all this activity, I worked for 8 to 10 hours a day in the first half of December and 10 to 15 hours a day in the second half. By December 23rd, my last day or work, I was a punch-drunk, gibbering wreck of a woman. The presents were all bought and wrapped, the cards posted to (most) of our friends and relations, the tree up and decorated and the house a filthy mess of plaster dust and disorganisation. I spent a good chunk of that afternoon asleep and the rest looking dazed. I think it took me 3 or 4 days to feel human again.

We had a wonderful Christmas Day. The kids were gratifyingly thrilled with their presents, the hoarfrost made the outside world look sparkling and magical and Mark cooked my favourite breakfast in all the world (eggs florentine with hot smoked salmon). We drove to Mum and Dad's for a big Christmas dinner with my brother and his daughters and our younger 2 crashed the night with their cousins while Big Lad enjoyed a bit of peace and quiet with the grown-ups.

Boxing day was lunch with M's parents, an orgy of gifts for the kids (again) including 2 of the noisiest and most irksome toys imaginable that I have banned them playing with in the kitchen to preserve my sanity, to the giggling delight of the kids, and a lovely brooch for me by Parisian jewellery designer Lea Stein. That night M and I had a late night drinking, talking and Wii-playing session with my brother, which was absolutely ace. He's a top bloke.

We had an utterly wonderful couple of days with my fabulous pal B and her family, celebrating miss B's 5th birthday with them to boot. The guys played Wii golf for hours, the kids read, played and grazed on food, B and I crammed a year's worth of chat into a day and a half, iced a cake and taught her eldest how to make scones.

I've done just little bits of baking for fun - I make lemon tarts and mince pies for fun, who's have thought it! - and otherwise have mostly messed about, gone to the movies, read, watched telly with the kids and played about. Oh, and hosted a party, but that's my own darned fault and a good time was had by all.

It's been blissful.

I've only today and tomorrow left of my holiday, and I really MUST do my accounts and tax return - oh, and college notes as well.

Or I could make myself some coffee and paint mermaid with Miss B...