Does everyone else have a voice in the back of your head that tells you not to do something? Do you listen? Do you pay attention and comply?
MY voice regularly bets me a fiver I can’t do something and looks where it’s got me.
Twelve years ago, MY voice bet me I couldn’t leave a secure job, albeit in a toxic environment, to start my own business.
While trying to raise a young family. Married to a chap working in the unpredictable emergency services. To this day, I’m still not quite sure who won the £5.
Eight years later…
This weekend sees us celebrating the eighth anniversary of opening our café doors.
The actual bricks and mortar side of the business, we’d started three years previously.
It was an accident. People laugh when I say this, but I promise, it was.
I was only looking for a site to get the commercial baking out of our house to regain a level of work life balance. I still haven’t achieved this either.
I’d started baking in 2002. It was just meant to be a hobby. Therapy mostly.
Having had a miscarriage, I found myself thoroughly depressed with no way to acknowledge it and no clue how to treat it.
Luckily enough to be surrounded by kind and caring friends who, alongside the mister immersed and enveloped me in love, I knew I needed to do something to help myself.
Himself was exceptionally relieved when I fixated on something new to distract me while I was still recuperating.
I found being alone and unoccupied wasn’t good for me.
A recipe for success
Arriving at the awkward dilemma; staying in the house was good for my anxiety but bad for my depression while leaving the house was good for my depression but bad for my anxiety.
Absorbed in recipes and baking, I could keep busy, distracted, and eventually delight in the results.
My first success was a white chocolate cheesecake.
The mister had a liking for white chocolate and when a recipe for it appeared in a magazine I was reading, I thought he might like it.
And so the baking started
I’d given up on reading gossip columns or taking fashion advice from magazines trying to convince me a ‘going from day to night’ outfit was going to be a big part of my adult working life.
To this day, it has not come up.
I also wasn’t the right audience for lipsticks costing £20 a pop, and a whole world of cooking publications opened to me instead.
Baking for two but using recipes aimed at families is never the best idea, so surplus was taken to work by the mister, who instantly gained more friends than he knew what to do with, and possibly a few extra pounds as well.
Long before Bake Off
Whipping up these home-baked goods came at a time long before the Great British Bake Off was even a thing.
Ironically, I remember when GBBO first launched, I wondered ‘who the hell is going to watch a bunch of randoms bake cakes?
Who the chuff is Paul Hollywood and why do we care he can make bread?
Fast forward eleven series later
Eleven series later and I’m sat on the edge of the sofa like ‘Bloody Hell Sharon, if you try to ice that Victoria sponge while it’s just out the oven, you’ll have absolutely f***ed it woman.
‘Waft woman, for the love of all things baked WAFT’.
Meanwhile me, baking at home, forgets to put flour in the cupcakes.
Numerous times every year, I am inundated with text messages telling me I could do better and should apply.
Couldn’t think of anything worse
I honestly couldn’t think of anything worse. I can literally bake what I can bake and that’s it.
I don’t have the skill or the patience for anything that required delicate hands or a patient nature.
Bish. Bash. Bosh. Bung and bake is the way forward in this lass’ kitchen.
What we want is a rather large wodge of cake with minimal effort and if it turns out wrong, well you’re only going to cut it up and eat it anyway.
We can always try it again.
So, congratulations to us. Team Kitschnbake. Past and present. Staff and customers.
I may not have won that fiver or found my work life balance, but I have made the most brilliant friends on this crazy journey.
