Archive note — 2019 year in review: This article looks back at cakes and business moments from 2019. Product ranges, collaborations, delivery volumes and dietary offers mentioned here belong to that period unless a current collection or product page says otherwise.
From Triumphs To Terrors: Our Best And Worst Cakes Of 2019
Business year-end reviews usually behave as if nothing ever went wrong. That is not really my style. 2019 had a huge high — our Patisserie Valerie collaboration — and a handful of cakes that taught us much more by being awkward, ugly or simply wrong for us.
The desserts we created for that collaboration launched through Patisserie Valerie at the time. This is brand-history material, not a claim that the range is still sold today.
1. The Scare Bear
The brief was a rainbow cake with a hand-modelled Care Bear. Our first topper looked genuinely alarming. Version two was much better. The other historical detail worth making explicit: the cake was described as vegan in the old article, but Anges de Sucre’s current physical bakery does not sell vegan cakes.
2. Cherry Bake-not-Well
On the baking competition I took part in, these almond, cherry, raspberry and white-chocolate desserts did not look remotely like the polished idea in my head. They looked like gouged eyeballs. Excellent Halloween energy, less excellent patisserie.
3. Cigarette cake
I disliked the brief before we started and liked the finished idea no more afterwards. That was useful: some concepts are a sign to say no, even when you technically can make them.
4. A wedding cake changed beyond recognition
One wedding commission began with our Pink Sweetheart design and went through a very long sequence of requested changes: removing the drip and doughnuts, changing piping, colour and flowers, and stripping out several of the details that gave the original cake its balance.
The final result was not a design I was proud of. That is the useful lesson and the only one worth keeping here: when enough individual changes are made to a coherent design, the whole can stop working. The customers’ identities and any later dispute are irrelevant to that design lesson.
5. Very wide two-tier cakes
I still think some 10-inch / 12-inch two-tier proportions can look squat. They are useful when the priority is servings and budget rather than height, but aesthetically I will usually prefer a taller proportion. That is taste, not an objective law of cake.
During 2019 we delivered roughly 3,000 cakes, according to the figures used in the original year-end review. Only a few made this list, which is probably a healthier perspective than pretending the bakery spent the year lurching from catastrophe to catastrophe.
Current cakes, current pricing and today’s dietary offer live in our cake collection, not in a 2019 retrospective.
Lots of sh!t-cake love,
Reshmi xoxo
Oh man Reshers, hands down best round up blog post ever.
This has had me howling Reshmi. I had a customer (one of the many horrors this Christmas) ask for a box that we had sold out of.
Me “sorry we don’t have any more £18.00 Danieli boxes left”.
Her “why not, you should have organised yourself properly”.
Me “it IS very close to Christmas, I can only apologise”.
Her (wait for it….)
“Those boxes are the only classy thing about your business”.