I have something new on the horizon to tell you about. I have being itching to write about this idea but I just haven’t had the time as I wanted to wait until I had my blog set up and this required a lot of behind the scenes work. Rearranging the blog takes a lot of work but this time around I was looking at the page speed, page size and the number of requests. Still not perfect but it is getting there and I am a lot happier with it than I was. I have spent many nights resizing and compressing images so that less space was taken up on the blog. So many deletions, emptying of caches and recycle bins but I think it has been worth it. Now I need to get in the habit of resizing and compressing images as I go so that there is never a build up of past posts. Going through nearly 300 posts has been a very tedious job 🙁
Anyway enough about that, back to my new idea which came about from an order which I received from a regular customer. I was asked if I could cater for a child’s birthday party. When I was asked, my first thought was if “I was capable of doing a good job”. However, as my husband pointed out I baked a lot for the market so I could surely bake for a party of so many children. The only birthday parties I have baked for have been my own children so I started to think about how much to bake, how much to charge and so on. I needed to work out costings for the bakes I was going to make and research what other birthday party caterers in the area charged for their party packages.
This took a lot of time to sort out but I eventually decided on a figure and yet I was still going to say no to the customer at the last minute as I was scared of doing a terrible job. After a last minute pep talk from my husband I agreed to the work and contacted the customer with a quote, I wrote up an invoice stating what was included and any questions I felt needed answered. Once I was happy with the invoice I dropped it off with the customer who agreed and paid the deposit almost immediately.
As the day drew closer I organised myself in my head and in writing so that on the day I would be able to just bake. Everything went to plan, loads of photos were taken, bakes were packaged ready for delivery and I felt very pleased with what I had achieved. I can honestly say I was nervous the day of the party when the bakes were passed over to the customer and I no longer had control. I think I spent the rest of that day waiting for a message to say something was wrong – like not enough food or something was horrible but no message was received. To be truthful, I sort of forgot about the party food until a few days later when I managed to message the customer and ask if everything was okay with her order.
Her reply was brilliant – “It was great. Thanks a lot. Went down really well” – short and concise but to the point don’t you think?
It gave me faith in myself and I am thinking that I could maybe add the birthday party package to my shop and see how it goes. There are a couple of things I want to add and remove to the original idea which I gave this first customer so once that is done I will be adding this idea to my webshop – for collection only of course.
Tomorrow, is a baking day for me as I have a few orders for the Halloween Cupcakes to do ready for collection and once that is done I can relax for the rest of the night as it is my birthday tomorrow. 🙂 As I have no children tomorrow evening because two are at a Halloween party, one is at a sleepover and one is away with friends for the week then my husband is taking me out for a meal to celebrate. We have already had a tea party with all the children at the weekend so they didn’t miss out. 🙁 It will be strange to be having a birthday treat without them but times change and I will be picking the two little ones on the way home from our meal so it is only a little break from them.
I have a Friday Treat Box planned for this week but we will see how that goes as I have Vegan Cupcakes order to complete for collection on Friday too. By the weekend, I hope to have shared a recipe with you and explained my new Conversion Calculator which I have added to my recipe pages courtesy of The Calculator Site.