Officially recognised

I had a meeting, which became an inspection, yesterday from an Environmental Health Officer.  It was designed to talk over what was required of me to register as a food seller/business with the Trading Standards authority.  She gave me lots of relevant leaflets, and talked over what I had considered doing regarding setting up as a possible business.  She was happy with what I said, made a few suggestions, helped me complete the registration form et voila!  Becca Bakes is open for business.  eek!  I'm not yet sure how busy I shall become, nor how busy I want to be.  I'm slightly scared, as I imagine all new start-up businesses are, that no-one will want my goods.  Also, there's some lovely ladies already baking beautiful, tasty cakes in our fair city (I know, I've tasted their goods and met the ladies) so I don't know that there's room for another - we'll see.

She suggested some ideas for marketing and growing the business and said to go ahead now and accept any orders that may come in.  So I did, and am doing a birthday cake for collection tomorrow afternoon - woo hoo!  Thanks for believing in me Steph C, hope you and your friends love the cake.

Spring is here...

Yellow-coloured sponge cake with yellow sparkle/red glitter

We had a lovely weekend with friends and today dawned brilliantly sunny.  Windy, sure, but gloriously sunny.  (I really really like the sunshine, can you tell?)  So here is last night's effort - a great big yellow coloured sponge cake, generously decorated with icing sugar, yellow sugar sparkles and red glitter, to welcome in the Spring.  Though from the photo it looks like I was too light-handed with the glitter, you can barely see it.  Sorry. A friend came over to play (with her kids) and have lunch, and this was dessert.  As were her home-made Hummingbird Bakery recipe chocolate chunk biscuits - yummy!  And she'd switched to using her new Cath Kidston beautiful floral Day Bag, such a lovely day for a lovely bag.  Totally makes you feel happy to be alive.

Chocolate chunk cookies

All-American chocolate chunk cookies

We're visiting a friend tomorrow morning whom we've not seen at home for a wee while, and she has a new cookery book to show me, from Pop Bakery.  So I felt it only right to bake something to bring along for us to nibble while the kids play - hence the cookies.  I'm also having a different friend over while our youngest kids are at nursery/kindergarten in the afternoon and we'll need something sweet to nibble with our coffee... hence the need for lots of food at once.  I made the cookies smaller than the recipe suggests, http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1769/allamerican-chocolate-chunk-cookies

and thus got 4 dozen rather than only 1.  But they must be mighty large cookies to make only 12!!  Last time I made 24 and this time they don't seem that much smaller...  But they'll go a lot further, as I'm sure the mini's will want some for morning tea or after-lunch treats, or even breakfast - knowing their genetically inherited love of chocolate.

Cupcakes & an Easter pudding

vanilla cupcakes with pale yellow buttercream

the same cupcakes with snow-white icing from the USA



Hot Cross bread and butter pudding

Here are the latest delicacies from our kitchen - delicious vanilla cupcakes in a midi-size.  This way they're not so big that you can't have a couple, and not too small so that the kids won't eat too many  ☺.  Although it didn't stop the mini-Becca's having more than one at once.  I think it's the variety of the toppings that tantalises them - first they chose a multi-coloured balls on white one, then one chose a pink sparkly one, another a black/white one.  The yellow iced ones were taken to my final meeting for the FPA-run Speakeasy course I've been attending for the last couple of months, really interesting and well-worth the time.  The other mums in the group were well-impressed (with taste and visuals), and the remainder went to the nursery teachers to say thanks for looking after mini-Becca #2 so I could attend.  Hope they liked them too!

The other item I tried was meant to be ready as an after-school snack, and as such it was a tad too warm for the mini's.  We all thought it was okay, not fab (so I won't be doing it again either) but nonetheless it was all gobbled up quite quickly.  Therefore, it's salad for dinner for me...