Well “Father’s Day” has been and gone and it is Monday so it’s back to the homeschooling. 🙂 Looking through my last months orders my Empire Biscuits are proving very popular at the minute as I have had about 16-20 orders over the last fortnight. I feel like I have been very busy this last month so thank you to all my customers, old and new. 🙂
The last four days I have baked non stop lots and lots of “Father’s Day” treats I had orders for. It made a lovely change as I baked sweet and savoury treats for collection from my door (contact free collection adhered to). Everything ran smoothly in the kitchen from the plentiful supply of all the ingredients needed to the amount of packaging I needed to use. A lot of organisation was needed here as I had a lot of orders to fulfill but I managed it with a lot of forward thinking. I felt a bit like a superwoman on Saturday and when everything was collected I just slumped on Saturday night. 🙁
As yesterday was Father’s Day, I spent my time with my family going for a walk and a picnic. As there were no toilets available we had limited time in the fresh air – about 2.5 hours in total before a child decided they couldn’t wait any longer for a toilet stop. My husband didn’t get any bakes as a present instead as I ordered a big box of sweets from CeeTees Sweeties – a local sweet business available on Facebook . I knew the children would be very helpful and eat the majority of the sweets for my husband but I don’t think he really minded at all. Our time away from the house was really nice as all the children were chatting and carrying on, including each other and being very happy – even in the thunderstorms and blustery wind but the best part was that no phones or headphones were seen 🙂 I love days like this and they don’t happen often enough in my opinion but we will just have to keep trying for some family time as this is when you realise that you have done alright as parents and everything is not as bad as you think? 🙂
Enough about my family and more about my plans for the week ahead. This morning I started early with an postal order for ….. yes you have guessed it – Empire Biscuits – . After a quick stroll to the Post Office to post the parcel it was time to start some home schooling. Once the school work was out of the way I started on my work.
My plans for today are to make a list of ingredients in my baking cupboard which I need to use as I am not wanting ingredients to go out of date. Once I know what ingredients I have I can find recipes that I can use and bakes that I want to do so that I can bake some different treats for customers and my family. The Friday Treat Box, this week, may be a mish mash of bakes but we will see how it goes.
At present, with the Covid-19 situation, I am avoiding having to go to the supermarkets still as I know the ingredients I use may not be available so I am having my main ingredients delivered from a wholesalers. As for the packaging I use I make sure I had enough in stock and I have reordered more to be delivered soon. I am always trying to plan two steps ahead and I have quite a few plans in the pipeline which I must find time to carry out before time passes me by.
This running your own business can be a challenge sometimes and the current situation certainly isn’t helping as you can become quite disheartened with it all but it is very fulfilling at times. Being self employed requires a lot of hard work so you have to be prepared to put the hours in to reap any rewards. I have been a home baker now for just over two years and it is only now that I am seeing a increase in the number of orders and a correlation to the analytics on google and visitors to my site. It is a lovely feeling but I have worked hard for it. 🙂
I am thinking that I might do a trial of something and share the recipe this week too – time permitting. I’m finding I make plans to do things and then I end up getting orders to fulfill and as the baking for customers comes first everything else has to take a back seat. If I am not baking I am homeschooling or trying to study for my online course so everything is rather militarised in my house for myself anyway. I don’t think my organisational skills and lists of things to do affects the children as they just get on and do what they need to do whilst my husband sits and plods on with his work stuff with myself running around balancing everything that I need to do. 🙂
As well as, all of the above tasks to be done for myself, there will be the usual housework to do but my two eldest girls are starting to take on more tasks such as ironing and making dinner so I feel like we are getting somewhere now on the life skills. My other job which I keep moving to the bottom of the list is the gloss work which I need to find time to do so that the painting will be completed. Maybe this week will be the week?? 🙂