Being a new company with a new product, it is difficult for us to describea typical day as every day is unique! Each week it is like being on a rollercoaster with a constant mix of emotions – nervousness, excitement and euphoria.
Our day generally starts at 5.15am – a few times a week we deliver our signature creation, the Biskie, to Harrods first thing in the morning. The rest of the week we leave it in our driver’s capable hands. We are a small companyand both of us are very hands-on, we think it is important to know howeverything operates and we like to get to know as many people as we can;from the guys in the loading bay through to the patisserie workers on the shopfloor.
Before our team of bakers and decorators arrive between 7 and 8am andthe rest of the world fire up their computers, we have a 10-minute power napon the office sofa, finish some urgent emails and drink a crucial cup of ourfavourite white tea with Acai berry.We head down to the kitchen, fire up the ovens and spend the morning inproduction where we bake our Biskies – our signature creation of a biscuit/cookie/cake, dream cakes or our other products for orders for the day. Weare both chief tasters so that means biskies, cake and sea salted caramel forbreakfast!
We only use natural ingredients in our products and make all of our owndecorations from scratch including the colourings. This makes production hardwork and intense but very rewarding, especially when you see the finishedproduct. Our team love how many skills they need to master to work in ourkitchen and each day we are all learning something new.
Each day is different and we can never predict what we might be asked todo. We receive anything from enquiries for biskies to be sent to Japan toorders for 500 jars of our award-winning handmade sea salted caramel fordelivery in 7 days’ time. Quite often our daily plan is thrown out of the window.
Last Friday evening, after a long, busy week finishing some of our orders, we received a phone call at 5pm asking if we could bake a two tierItalian flag cake for one of the X-Factor contestants. We are ‘yes’ girls all theway and don’t like to let our clients down, so we started baking straight awayto make sure the cake would be ready for filming the next day. We ended upappearing on national TV with it too!
We really value all of our staff and the hard work they put in – without them,fulfilling some of requests would be impossible. We provide them with theirlunch every day and ensure that we all sit down for at least 15 minutestogether for a rest and a chat. While the team carry on enjoying lunch, weusually jump on our computers to deal with some of the endless admin. Thenit’s back down to the kitchen for the afternoon to finish preparations for theweek or product development.
We are continuously inventing new biskie flavours or other products such asour all-natural flavoured vegetarian marshmallows and dream cakes. We arenot classically trained chefs (Annabel is an ex-city girl and Emily a lawyer) sosome of techniques are unconventional. We like to be innovative in our foodcreations and this means that product development can be full of surpriseswith unexpected results – not all good – we remember making blueberryhoneycomb that tasted distinctly fishy! We encourage our team to be creativetoo which is a lot of fun for all of us. We photograph all our products in-house,so we often take finished products to the photography corner for a photoshoot to send out for magazines and to put on our website or Instagram forour fans to see.
Unless it is Christmas or Valentines our team leave at around 6pm. Wehead back up to the office to deal with administration, website maintenanceor photo editing. We normally finish around 7.30pm and either go home tocook dinner or eat out in one of our favourite London restaurants – we can’tremember the last time we said ‘no’ to dessert.
The evening is when we get a chance to reflect on what has happened in theday; we also discuss how we can further improve operations and the strategyof the business along with any opportunities that may have arisen duringthe day. We will often do a little more work at home depending on what isrequired. We are currently working on a cookbook that is focused on bakingusing natural ingredients. We are including a section on how to make naturalfood colourings at home using fruits and vegetables and how to use them andthis means lots of researching, testing and writing recipes.
After we finish our work we either relax or head straight to bed. Sometimeswhile we are trying to drift off, ideas will pop into our heads, so we alwayskeep a notebook on our bedside tables so we can scribble them all downbefore getting some much needed sleep.