This last week or so I have found myself spending lots of quiet time thinking about where I want my home baking business to go (and a whole lot of baking) which has left my website quite unattended and very unloved. 🙁 I’m still not sure which direction I want to take myself but I know that I feel like I am starting all over again. Since moving house in April, lots of other things have got in the way and there has always been something to use as an excuse for me not to do anything positive with the website.
The last few days have been taken up with decorating my own birthday cake which has been a hit with my family 🙂 I wanted to make a scary Halloween themed cake for myself so I set about making a Scary Doll Cake. I have made these doll cakes before for my own children and customers but never a scary one. After baking, a vanilla sponge and sandwiching the layers togather with vanilla buttercream and raspberry jam I set about decorating it 🙂 The doll which I bought lost her head and her legs plus quite a bit of hair. With the help of my daughter, who likes all things gory and scary, we decorated the doll with a sugarpaste skirt, sprinkles and then lots of blood (red food gel and red icing). The doll’s head was hung from her hand to show her decapitation off 🙂 This has been the goriest cake I have ever decorated but it was fun to do. I have made a video of the full method for this cake which I am still editing as I want to post it on several sites such as Youtube, Tik Tok and Instagram (which all require different video styles) so there is a lot of work involved. In the meantime, I have shared the links to my sites on these platforms for you to see what I have been sharing recently 🙂
Birthday Doll Cake 
Scary Doll Cake
Today, is the day when I start to make changes in where my priority lies within my life so that the homebaking no longer takes a back seat. I am not giving up on all the other areas of my life that I need to attend to but I am going to be more productive and fine tune my home bakery so some areas of this household will be ignored (not the children though).
I have a lot of admin which I want to get through and some DIY jobs for my husband and myself to do in preparation for Christmas. This week, once my children are all back to school and college, I will restart with the decorating as I have been rather lazy recently but I am getting there slowly. The next room I am concentrating on is the kitchen but only after I have finished the glosswork upstairs and there is a whole lot of banister to be repainted before I make it to the kitchen 🙂 Wish me luck on this?
My first jobs in re-working my baking business are :-
- to cull some of the products which I don’t feel are good sellers
- look at the product costs just to see if I need to alter the prices of any of my products or just remove them due to the costs to bake them.
- to share some posts on several facebook groups which I have joined as I must try to advertise myself as I feel like I am not trying in this area.
- to add some recipes which I want to share onto Pinterest and Yummly plus a few other recipe sites 🙂
- to rewrite parts of my recipe books which I wrote a few years ago as I want to make updates because my ideas have changed and I know that I can improve these recipe books further 🙂
Today, is going to be spent thinking what I want to share on the facebook groups to advertise my business. I think it will have to be something along the lines of Christmas Bakes but I would like to offer a Friday Treat Box just to test the water, as it were, but what to do. Maybe I should base my Friday treats on the Foodie Calendar days which is how I used to do my treats every week? Lots of decisions are being made in the love-to-bake.uk kitchen and office this week 🙂