And so the adventure begins.....

Sometime last spring, when demands for my cakes made a sudden increase, I began to mull over the idea that maybe I could make a career out of my cakes with the ultimate goal of quitting my day job.  My speciality has always been custom designed cakes, but to broaden my horizons I began to research cupcakes as an alternate method to bring in the income.  I reasoned that cupcakes need far less preparation time than a custom cake, and they can be sold in volume, unlike custom cakes.

My first step was to trawl the internet to see what's out there, who's making them and how, and what is the going price for a cupcake.  The scope and scale was AMAZING!  So I quickly decided that since I still want my cakes to be my primary product, I needed to first define a finite selection of cupcake flavours that I would produce.  Secondly I needed to come up with a signature appearance for my cupcakes.

In the end the latter was the easiest to decide; my cupcakes would be covered with a traditional or a rose swirl of icing and adorned with a single rose or simple flower.

Deciding on the flavours has evolved into a whole summer long project.  My two kitchen elves, Elli and Caitlin have been instrumental in the process.  The first major project was to develop a strawberry cheesecake flavoured cupcake that had a real STRAWBERRY flavour to it.  After much internet surfing and several trial batches we finally came up with a version that has an intense natural strawberry flavour, backed up with a swirl of pure strawberry puree.  We top this cupcake with a strawberry flavoured cream cheese icing.  All of my loyal taste testers have agreed that it is awesome.  This picture is of the very first version we did.

Strawberry Cheesecake

Over the summer we also perfected the following flavours: Carrot Cake, Lemon, Vanilla, Chocolate Zucchini (which we have christened "Death by Chocolate").  In the process of being perfected are; Red Velvet, Tiramisu and Chocolate Moccha.  Red Velvet needs to be more chocolate flavoured and as I speak I have a fresh, newly tweaked batch in the oven. I'll let you know how they came out in the next post!  Tiramisu was fabulous, but far too moist.  That one should be easy to fix too.

That's all for now!