The UK government has released a new, tighter, set of rules and restrictions.

Social gatherings are limited to six people, indoors or outdoors excluding certain functions such as weddings in covid-secure compliant venues. Weddings are now restricted to 15 people. Pubs and restaurants are to close earlier, at 22:00.

So what does this mean? Well, personally, not a lot. Not like my personal life was particularly on fire prior to the latest announcement. In terms of our cake delivery business in London though, also not a lot.

Having ridden the waves of this pandemic since February, we adapted to make the business suit the uncertain climate. There are no weddings as we knew them, no big milestone birthday parties, no huge company events. But we made and delivered thousands of smaller celebration cakes, throughout lockdown to people’s homes, and thereafter, to restaurants, pubs and hotels.

It has been stressful, and the uncertainty of when all this is going to end is the worst bit. But through it all, we have fine-tuned our operations, and are continually working on making the business work for us.

Being classed as “key workers” in the economy, as food producers, has meant we can continue to bake and bring cake-joy to our customers with our covid-safe measures strictly in place. As long as we are able to and allowed to bake cake and deliver, we will.

So what are the changes we are working on?

Prices

This is particularly annoying because I did a huge overhaul at the start of the pandemic. But since then, our suppliers have announced more price increases and the congestion charge going up and being applied on weekends has been a real twist of the cake knife.

Wedding Cakes

Truth be told, I’m liking the far fewer, and much smaller weddings. Why? Because previously, a typical wedding enquiry was a PITA. The bigger the wedding, the more exacting and higher the demands. Lots of emails and quoting back and forth.

Requests for the dreaded “free samples”. No, I don’t fancy baking 8 different flavours of cake, only to cut them up into cute little squares, packaged into their own little cute bags, placed into a mailing box, and posted via Next-Day-Delivery for free or “redeemed”. If it means we don’t get the order, then so be it.

What we have got however are total gems of couples having smaller weddings, with small wedding cakes, with very minimal fuss if any at all. It’s SO RELAXING. Instead of being a fraught, anxious mess, I’m singing along to Ace of Base making their wedding cakes. Sure, it’s “less money” than the big wedding cakes of yester-years, but considering I’m spending far less time faffing over the details (time which is never paid for, as we don’t stick on a “wedding tax” that people tend to think wedding suppliers do), and caking more, I’m happy with that.

Cancellations

“Due to Covid” has become a phrase that’s beginning to wear thin. Covid’s been around for 8 months now. Unless we are made to stop caking and can not deliver, we can and will cake. I would rather people just ordered smaller cakes and not cancel, than order bigger cakes and then try to cancel with less than decent notice claiming “due to Covid”. If there is a local lockdown, and your venue you are having the cake delivered to is closed, we can change the address. Just please don’t order something you feel you may have to cancel. It really sucks.

You’ll never regret getting someone, or yourself, a birthday cake, peen cake, or any other celebration cake. It’s literally one of the most basic and few forms of joy there is in celebrating anything during this absolutely shocker of a year.

Lots of love,

Reshmi xoxo