A week of ups and Sussex downs...

This last week we really seem to have been on a rollercoaster with the Brighton Bakery. 

At the start of the week I made a footballer birthday cake for our friends David and Denis that they both really loved and said it looked and tasted amazing (thanks guys). 

While I was in the middle of making their cake, the phone rang and I took our very first wedding cake order.  I'm so excited to make it and really proud we've reached this milestone, especially considering the website's only been up for 6 weeks!

On Thursday we got an email from Brighton Council to say that we've been allocated an allotment at the top of Whitehawk Hill.  There's a great community atmosphere there and a fantastic view over the Marina.  One day we'll be able to offer cakes with fillings made from our very own fruit trees :o)  Unfortunately the allotment is currently an undulating patch of brambles, weeds and rubbish... but Melissa and I aren't afraid of hard work and this allotment is going to be a huge part of the lifestyle that we dreamed of when we decided to move down to Brighton.

Yesterday we took part in the first ever Indulge Sussex Sunday in Hove.  We spent almost two full days preparing and baking our hearts out and were looking forward to finishing the week off on a high with a successful stall day. 

We set up our stall at the Hove Town Hall, and in pride of place was a Christmas showcake I made with carol singing penguins:

We had high hopes that we could get some pre-orders for our luxury Christmas Cakes as well as selling plenty of our regular sweet treats and cake slices.  We had some of our regular favourites plus new additions of Autumn Spiced Pumpkin Cupcakes (completely yummy and totally vegan), Banana and Butterscotch Muffins (a great flavour combo) and a Seriously Good Chocolate Orange Cake (which definitely lives up to its name).  The weather seemed perfect for the indoor event - bright and sunny to get people out but with a cold wind to drive people indoors.  As the only cake stall and a potential for 2400 visitors surely this one was a sure thing?

The event started slowly at 11am but that's not unusual.  We'd learnt from experience that prime cake time is 3pm-5pm so we weren't too worried as it was sure to pick up later. 

At about 1.30pm at was still kinda quiet, but we figured people were having Sunday lunch and were probably going to come afterwards, plus it still wasn't quite cake o'clock.

It reached about 2.30pm there just still weren't many people coming through the doors. 2400 people?  We reckoned the total was more like 240.  The chances weren't looking that good for us to make much money.

At 3.30pm we still had an hour and a half to go when we realised that a couple of stalls behind us had already packed up and gone.  Ten minutes later the stall beside us (the excellent Lurgashall Winery) was also packing up.  The event organisers decided to wind up an hour early, right in the middle of caking hour.

Oh dear. Well it had to happen sometime - Sunday was our first market stall flop.  Two days of both Melissa and me working solidly (plus me preparing all the day before that too) and just taking into account our stall fee, ingredients and parking we came out with a loss of £7.64.  And we can't exactly sue ourselves for not earning the minimum wage...

But at least we did sell something (some stalls didn't even sell a single thing), we got our name out there and the people that did buy our cakes really seemed to enjoy them.  We've got a couple of leads for Christmas cakes and birthday cakes too so it's not all bad.  If you see it as a marketing exercise, £7.64 isn't a big price to pay. 

Plus we were home and unpacked by 4.35pm, so we walked up to our new allotment site and then considered our plan of action over a well earned pint looking out onto the sea as the sun went down.  We might not make much money, but I think Melissa and I are living the dream.

All sold out at Picnic in the Park

I think the gods must have been smiling down on us yesterday because it was a glorious day in Queens Park for our second Brighton Bakery cake stall.  The sun shone all day as the harmonies of the Brighton Beach Boys sang out from the central stage and the families flocked in with their picnic blankets to fill the park in their hundreds.

While this story has a happy ending, it didn't start out so well.  Our last minute treasure hunt for a gazebo on Friday was utterly essential on the day but that morning it seemed to take forever to build.  Maybe investing the the more expensive concertina one would have been a better bet on reflection...

And while the park was packed to the brim with people, nobody seemed to be buying anything.   What was also a bit frustrating was that out of the 50 stalls there, 10 of them were selling cakes.  By 2pm I was getting really worried as we'd hardly sold anything and from chatting to the other stallholders around us we weren't the only ones.  Looking around the park people had brought tuppawares of food from home and didn't need to buy from us.  Melissa and I prepared ourselves that we were going to have to bring a lot of cake home.

But we just needed to have a little faith.  Cake o'clock hit at around 3pm and trade really picked up - over the next 3 hours we sold out of practially everything we had brought with us.  Result!

We gave away quite a few sample tasters and discounted the prices at the end of the day, which when I was totting up the totals today made quite a difference in the amount of money we could have made - it would have been so good if we had made it past the £100 mark.  But I think samples are important and we managed to double the amount of profit we made at the Kemptown Carnival with a third less stock - a real achievement.  We also gave out plenty of business cards and got some great feedback from the people that tried our cakes so there's not really much more we could have asked for.

The one thing I would have changed is going for a few pints to celebrate without eating dinner - I've really been paying for it with my hangover today... ;o)

So all that's left for me to say is a massive thank you to everyone that came and supported us and tried our cakes yesterday - hope you enjoyed them!

xx

Kemptown Carnival - our first market stall a success!

I have to start off this post with a huge THANK YOU to everyone that came down to support our Brighton Bakery stall at the Kemptown Carnival yesterday.  We had a really great day, met some lovely people and even managed to make a profit so I think we can proudly say that our first market stall was a success.

After a marathon baking session on Friday using as much local produce as possible (sourced from the excellent Park Farm Shop on the outskirts of Brighton) we arrived to set up our stall with over 200 sweet treats for sale.  As this was our first stall we could only guess at how much to bring, but based on 10,000 people coming to the carnival and the hefty £110 stall fee to cover we hoped that 200 was a good number that would at least cover our costs.

We didn't get off to the best start when the table we had hired from the carnival turned out to be 4 times the size we had ordered, but luckily we had a lovely stall neighbours Brighton Peach who lent us a larger tablecloth and we were good to go.

It was a bit slow to begin with, but we figured 10am wouldn't be prime cake buying time (I think I might be in the minority of people that like cake for breakfast).  It was a shame that we were right at the far end of the street so we didn't get anywhere near the footfall of the stalls in the middle, but there's not much we could have done about that.  After lunchtime things really picked up and we had a pretty steady trade throughout the afternoon.  At about 4.30 we dropped our prices which really helped - maybe we had been a bit ambitious with our prices to start off with so we will definitely look at that next time as we did end up bringing a few things back home with us.

We had a few strange looks from people when they realised our cakes were made using vegetables, but once they tried some of the free samples of our beetroot brownies they were won over and they started to fly off the plate and ended up becoming our best seller of the day.  Our Lemon Marmalade Flapjacks and Sticky Jamaican Ginger Cake also went down really well.  But I was surprised that the Chocolate and Banana Muffins didn't really tempt anyone and the Chilli Chocolate Cake (which I thought would be a real winner) didn't sell very well either.  Maybe it was the prices, maybe the portion sizes or maybe it was the choice of products but we will definitely look at changing them next time.  We also had several people come up and ask us if we sold any vegan cakes so I will be doing some research and there will be a vegan option for our next stall.  Speaking of which, the next event we will be at is the Picnic in Queen's Park on 26 June (see how seamlessly I slipped that one in??)

Despite my best Apprentice-style selling efforts dropping everything to £1 for the last 20 minutes we did have quite a lot leftover so anyone stopping by at ours in the next couple of days will be leaving with a goodie bag of treats.  And even though we had leftovers, we managed to sell more than £200 worth of cakes which covered the cost of the stall and ingredients and gave us a small profit.  If we take into account my labour costs for baking and Melissa and my costs for running the stall on the day then it's not very impressive, but this was always going to be a learning experience and we knew we were never going to make a huge profit.  It was also about more than making money - we wanted to get our name out to promote the bespoke cake side of the business and as a marketing tool I think it went very well.  Lots of people picked up cards, we made a few contacts and I even got 2 minutes on the radio to plug our business so I think we can be pretty pleased with that.

So lessons learned, bring on the next stall!