Tag Archives: beginning a cupcake business

The Beginning

14 Jun

So the dream begins to take life. Yesterday I baked my heart out for my first cupcake testing day today. Leading up to my 2am baking session, the work day was a whirlwind and I didn’t get home until 19:15. At which point I began to prep my ingredients, consult the recipe every few seconds and finally bake my cupcakes. Alongside baking, I was also cooking. I totally overbooked myself and scheduled my first cupcake recipe development baking on the same night as an advice night with a good friend of ours who has set up his own business. He is totally the creative type and we chatted and brainstormed for hours. He came up with tons of good ideas for promotions and he really questioned me about my motivations and key drivers behind starting my cupcake business. It was really enlightening because I had never really formally formulated why I wanted to start this business. So he gave this homework assignment. I have to answer the following questions:

Why do I want to live this idea?

How will I live this idea?

What parts of me are in this idea?

Stay tuned for my journey of self discovery. Luckily, while preparing dinner earlier, I managed to cook all the cupcakes, so those were done and dusted. So after dude left at ridiculous o’clock, I started to make the homemade caramel that went into the middle. It was a beautiful process although I was a bit overly paranoid about burning the sugar since I don’t have a candy thermometer, so the process was slow and careful and slowly but surely, the sugar turned amber and started to smell heavenly and I took it off at just the perfect time. Easy does it! is what I say. I added some homemade heavy cream (i.e. what you get when you find double cream (48%) and whipping cream (36%) in Germany and then combine the two to get some percentage in the middle 40ish% (percentage for heavy cream), see how good I am at math!) and viol(insert symbol)à! Homemade caramel…I quickly poured the caramel into little wells inside my perfect chocolate cupcakes. Hey, wait, I never told you about the chocolate cupcakes. Well there are two secret ingredients in there my friends: a cup of freshly brewed coffee and vegetable oil. One to accent the chocolate flavor and the other for moistness. Mmm mmm, good. So it was already 1:30 in the morning and I still had the ganache icing to do. And I did it. I got a blissfully shiny chocolate icing to frost my chocolate caramel cupcakes with…however the frosting would have to wait as I decided to call it a day come 2:15am…I fell into bed and fell into an anxious sleep wondering if it was time to get up and frost cupcakes already and finally woke up, thinking of butter. And what time the grocery store opened so I could get more if I ran out of frosting and had to make more that morning.

My long night and my early morning filled with anxious thoughts about butter and frosting and then onto thoughts about the cupcake testers not liking my cupcakes after I put so much work in, (yet they still looked amateur) really made me realize that this is what having your own business is like. You put yourself out there, you work damn hard and your mind is never free of business improvement ideas. Is this what I really want? That question was unexpectedly answered, as I packed the freshly frosted cupcakes into my car to take to the taste testers and my car filled up with the glorious smell of chocolate. How rich, how decadent. Yes, I am really going to do this.

P.S. How many parentheses did I use in that second paragraph!??