Here’s a little story about my love-hate relationship with influencers.

Many moons ago, when we had a cake and coffee shop, in a very fancy part of town with fancy rents and bitter neighbours. We were struggling with it and we decided to drum up our marketing efforts. One of these efforts was to host a cake decorating workshop for influencers. Taught by yours truly.

We had a confirmed guest list of 6 attendees. We baked 14 sponges, made 5kg of Swiss meringue buttercream, 2kg of chocolate ganache, a mountain of macarons, heaps of doughnuts. We worked late to set the shop up for the workshop. We also had bubbles for our VIP guests on arrival.

The clock struck 18:30...and we had our first arrival, Rebecca, aka the @RunawayKiwi. We poured some drinks and made some very good small chat. It was now 18:45....let’s wait a little longer for the others to arrive, shall we? I checked my phone and emails for any updates incessantly but heard nothing.

By 19:00, we were done waiting, and also on our second glass of bubbles. It was then when I swallowed my prosecco with my last shred of pride down and said let’s get decorating these cakes before we get plastered.

So Rebecca and I polished off the bubbles and had a great time. We chatted about bad influencer behaviour, and had bants galore whilst I showed her how we do our cake decorating thang. It was JOKES.

This was 5 years ago. Since then Rebecca has had our birthday cakes, a citizenship cake (that’s a thing!), and now her lockdown wedding cake!!

I’m so glad those other losers didn’t show that day. Because this virtual friendship would probably not have panned out this way had they turned up. Congrats Mr & Mrs Vimes! I’m so glad to be a part of so many of your special occasions, in our small cakey way, and wish you both lots of love and laughs!

Reshmi xoxo