Yesterday was an unusual Friday. The UK is under strict lockdown and it's a drier, greyer, and grimmer January than most. It was a long work week and I was knick-knacked. Yet, we celebrated some very good news at home with our newest cake - the Kinder Bueno vs Nutella cake that's caused a bit of a stir on ye olde gram!

So how does one celebrate anything in lockdown? With nowhere to go, I dressed up in my hot red dress, blow dried my hair, made-up my mug, and got snug under the blanket on the couch. And having exhausted all the restaurant takeaways in possibly all of West London, Patrick made an array of Asian-inspired tapas - lemongrass prawn balls, mushroom cromesquis, lamb kebabs and battered gooey mozzarella balls. GOSH, I WAS BURSTING LIKE A RED HOT FRANKFURTER out of my dress.

But back to our little celebration. Nope, not preggs. It's not a cool new business deal or anything like that either. In fact, far from. It's a big painful chapter finally closed. 

Many years ago, we made a bad business decision: a terrible investment in a PR agency which turned into an ugly dispute due to the amount of money involved and the poor results yielded. We ended up being forced to pay for work never done; a honey trap was set and we fell for it (like others, we later found out) due to our inexperience. It was, and still is, a huge amount to lose as a small business but this Friday we finally cleared the debt. The mental relief is epic. This is the stuff businesses don't necessarily talk about as it's not sexy. It was a rough, painful, but very valuable lesson learnt, and the burden lifting of never having to deal with it, or anyone like them again was elating. We were buzzing like a pair of really happy hippos. Like I said, it's not anything to celebrate in terms of shiny business goals, but during these times, having any reason to celebrate is good enough.

This week also saw my creative mind getting juiced after a very long time. I finally got my hands on a vat of Kinder Bueno style filling - creamy, white chocolate and hazelnut goodness. The temptation to bathe in it is too much. It smells AMAZING.

I'll be playing a lot more with it, but for my first cake using it I decided to pair it with our customers' other fave - Nutella. And omg omg, WOWWIE!

Chocolate and vanilla sponge layers, lots of Kinder Bueno-Nutella Swiss meringue buttercream, sexy striped fault line style and decorated with Buenos, Kinder bars, rochers and happy hippos.

I brought it home to binge on in my red dress, washing it down with pink Sussex bubbles (no champagne in the budget...we paid off a crappy debt, didn't win the lottery! LOL).

 

I often get asked by other small business owners how we get press coverage and if we would advise spending on PR. Hell no, we would never invest in PR again and wouldn't recommend it either (if we were a massive business it maybe very different).  And about how we get coverage? I really don't know, as the best coverage is always organic. Perhaps we're lucky where we get found through word of mouth. Perhaps my mouthiness pays off in PR results (ahem, BBC, Fox, Vogue, Evening Standard, TimeOut cover...but who's keeping tabs ;)). Perhaps our cakes just sell themselves. I don't know what it is. What I do know is that fluffy PR is like yesterday's fish n chip paper, but great cake is here to stay.

Lots of love, 

Reshmi xoxo