2015 is nearly over folks and it’s been one crazy and amazing year for us! We found our designs featured on even more stunning glossy magazines and ‘book’azines, booked in some pretty exciting wedding cakes for 2016 (VERY limited dates available now), made some very important (yes top secret) business decisions, and designed some damn gorgeous wedding cakes too.
We have a few favourite cakes of the year and to start the list above is a super pretty cake we created based on the simple idea of pearls and a floral crown! Every single flower, berry and leaf was hand made and fully adorned the base of the crisp white cake. To add a little texture and interest we hand piped lots of scattered royal icing swiss dots from the top downwards before painting each individually with edible lustre.
We kick started the year as cover stars on the 2015 Spring issue of Cake Decoration Heaven magazine with our super cute afternoon tea bunny cake design! It was such an honour to have our little birthday cake grace the cover of such a fabulous magazine. We have to admit that we hovered around the magazine aisle in awe armed with our cameras and iPads snapping away. Other amazing publications our work was featured in for 2015 include… Brides, Wedding Cakes Magazine, other creative issues of Cake Decoration Heaven magazine and World’s Best Wedding Cakes by Amy Doak!
Another really exciting thing we did this year was to shut down the cake decorating supply side of our business, put our website on indefinite hiatus and concentrate on making our marketing and branding utterly perfect for us and what we want to achieve. We hired a few graphic design/branding companies, but in the end we created everything ourselves (yes, we’re those people). Felicity was left hunched over her MacBook for a cringeworthy number of hours a day for a few weeks trying to remember all those CAD and Photoshop lessons from fashion school. It was trying, but it sure was worth it in the end. Our new sparkling logo, watermarks, blog re-design, social media graphics are fabulous and we love them. Our design direction needed to be bright, light-hearted, fun, approachable and of course glamorous!
2015 was also all about finding and establishing a better rhythm in terms of work. We designed our own worksheets such as consultation forms, order invoices and blog work planners! It really helped for us to scrap our old way of keeping information and pay closer attention to how we actually work. It was also pretty cool to have our work sheets and forms match our company branding. We had to stop at gold foiling everything though or else we’d never get any actual work done!
This year, photography-wise, we utilised natural light a lot more as our photography room/studio moved over to a western facing room with super large windows. We’d relied on bright professional photography lights to get shots in overcast weather or on night times in the past, but by simply moving rooms we get to shoot things au natural!
The above two cakes (Peony Ruffle Wedding Cakes and Black Forest Gateau Naked Cake) were by far our most popular designs in 2015. We lost track at some point in October by just how many enquires and press requests we had for them. December, in fact, saw our Black Forest Gateau Naked Wedding Cake in two HUGE magazines at the exact same time (Brides by Condé Nast) and Wedding Cakes (by Squires Kitchen - which also featured the Peony Ruffle Cake).
One of the proudest moments of our year was having 6 of our designs featured in Amy Doak’s World’s Best Wedding Cakes bookazine! It’s positively crammed full of incredible cake artists whose designs we love so it was amazing for our wedding cakes to be nestled amongst the work of some huge names in the industry. We were also lucky enough to have a tutorial for our signature sugar peony featured as well as a beautiful write up with one of our past couples. We created a wonderfully pretty and vintage inspired cake for Ann-Marie and Adrian’s wedding with handmade hydrangeas, roses, blue tit birds and broderie anglaise lace trims a couple of years ago. It was amazing to read all about their big day and about how much they love/loved their cake. It’s still one of our favourites!
One half of Juniper Cakery (Felicity) celebrated her 32nd birthday this year with a pink and gold naked cake that perfectly matched our brand spanking new logo and branding look. Adorned with pink Eliza roses, golden silk eucalyptus leaves and dotted with dainty pink and gold macarons this beauty would have been perfect if we were having a re-launch party!
Of course we just had to feature the very last wedding cake of 2015 that we made - a winter influenced macaron tower cake. Not just because it was the last cake of the year for us, but because we absolutely love it. It encompassed winter perfectly for us. Not only was its colour palette soft, frosty and beautifully vintage but every element of the design filled us with excitement. Glistening silver sequins, festive macaron flavours (Pistachio and Cherry and After Dinner Mint), quirky and stunning flowers - all wonderfully winter-esque.
We’re sure we’ll have missed a thing or two in this end of year post, but 2015 was fast paced for us and now we’re super excited for 2016. We’ve already lots of amazing couples and designs booked in, a few magazine features in the pipeline and we’re like a two woman army in terms of organisation already! So now it’s time to bid farewell to the past year, drink a bit of champagne and power through 2016 like never before. We hope everyone enjoys a fabulous New Year and 2016!
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