Getting Serious

Bakeries with "The Look", originally uploaded by Flying Time Designs.

Oh my! What am I getting myself into?

I've been having a great time making pretty cupcakes, playing with packaging, taking pictures, looking at pictures of bakeries I like (like the ones shown above)…doing all the fun parts of starting and having a cupcake & cookie business but, I've decided it's time to get on with it and start making some real plans to try to turn my dreams into reality.

Here's some of the steps I've taken since my last post…

•I talked with a connection at work about having a booth at a community event in mid-July. I think this will be a good place to show the community what I do and this event draws the kind of people I think will be interested in my cookies and cupcakes. It might be a good way to test the market. However, this is an outdoor event and in prior years the weather has always been bad. I'm worried about how my cupcakes and cookies will hold up if it's really hot. I have no idea, how many cookies and cupcakes I should plan to bring. I don't know how I'm going to set up my booth, but I know I need to get some signs and things made for it. I'm going to be gone next weekend and the weekend after that I'm going to be really busy so I don't know when I'm going to work on getting ready for this. I need to order some of the specialty items I want to use to make some of the things I want to make. I need to firm up my prices. I should get new business cards made (the ones I have now are more "etsy oriented"). What am I thinking?

• I talked with my realtor friend this week about finding a kitchen/bakery space. This friend has great business sense, knows a lot about the community and has a great sense of style. She seemed very supportive of my idea to start this business. I really value her opinion so I was glad she didn't laugh at me and tell me I'm a nutcase/dreamer! She had a few really good ideas about places that might work for me. Ohhhhh mannnnn… talking locations makes this all seem very real and a bit overwhelming. Therefore…I started working on my business plan again and really trying to crunch the numbers. I'm not sure what my expense are going to be yet but I'm thinking I'm going to have to make and sell somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 cupcakes or 100 cookies a day for this to work. I have a few other ideas about how to bring in income including "make your own cupcake parties", but still…Can it be done? Can I get that many cupcakes/cookies made? (theoretically I can) Can I sell that many a day, especially if I decide not to have a store-front right away?
Will people around here pay $1.50-$3.00 for a cupcake? Once I start showing my stuff at local events will I get many orders? If I do will I be able to handle them while I'm still working full time? Will I know when it's safe to quite my day job and start baking full-time?

Is it worth going through all this work and stress and risk to make this happen? YES darnit! The alternative would be to spend the rest of my days in a windowless cubicle at the mercy of a boss, probably watching someone else open up this type of business. NO WAY!

Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries!

You gotta love a three day weekend and this has been a great one! Friday, the UPS man brought me my new cupcake and cookie boxes (see the picture below). I love packaging things up all pretty so I couldn't wait to get them. Here's where I found them.

Friday night was also kinda stormy so it was a great night for baking. (I LOVE cozy, stormy, baking evenings at home!!!!!) I tried a new recipe for Italian Cream Cupcakes from the Cupcake Doctor. I topped them with cream cheese frosting and decorated most of them for a wedding with gumpaste flowers and royal icing accents (not a real wedding, just building my portfolio and trying new things). The rest are decorated with some candy raspberries I found at the candy shop and gumpaste flowers.


Saturday was the annual Memorial Day Flee Market in a nearby town so my mom and I went to that. I found a bunch of cute things for myself and for my etsy store. I even managed to get all the vintage stuff shown in the picture listed! (I'm better at buying the stuff than getting it sold!)

Unfortunately, after all that fun, I'll have to devote the rest of today to getting organized, laundry and putting my house put back together!

Sweet and Simple

Refrigerator Cookies, originally uploaded by Flying Time Designs.

Chocolate Refrigerator Cookies have always been a favorite in my family. I got the recipe from my mom who got it from Grandma who (as I recently found out) got it from Betty Crocker! I have a 1963 copy of the Betty Crocker Cooky Book, so I pulled it out and there it was!
I love this recipe and I love this cookbook. The cookies are so cute and charming yet, for the most part, simple. No fancy schmancy ingredients that can't be found in any ordinary super market, no recipes with 8,000 steps.
Betty has several varieties of refrigerator cookies in this book. Our Chocolate Refrigerator Cookie recipe is actually a variation of her Vanilla Sugar Cookies. I made a double batch then divided the dough into fourths. I left 1/4 plain, made 1/4 chocolate, added pink to 1/4 and blue to the last 1/4. Then I had fun creating sprirals and bullseyes with the different colors and flavors. For extra fun and color I rolled each log of dough in colored sugar. My cookies aren't perfectly round. I've read that you can cut open a paper towel tube and put your dough log in it to keep it from flattening out but I didn't have a stock pile of empty paper towel tubes.

It's fun bake these cookies and package them up to give away but I also like to give away a log of the dough with a cute label that has baking instructions on the back. That way friends can enjoy them freshly baked!

A Real Business Woman

Sugar and Meringue, originally uploaded by Flying Time Designs.

Hi! Just thought I'd show you some pictures from the new (old) cookbooks I just listed in my etsy shop. These images are from three different cookbooks but I love the way they look together. The colors are just so sweet!

I finally got my business cards uploaded to Vista Print and they came yesterday. I was pathetically excited to get them. I feel so "official" now. Can't wait to include them with my etsy orders and give them to my friends. It's the little things make me so happy.

Mother's Day

My creation, originally uploaded by Flying Time Designs.

Here's a little bit of a glimpse into how I think and how I find inspiration for my cookie designs.

I made a new friend in the blog world, Happy Loves Rosie. Her sight is so "happy" and colorful. Very inspiring. She has a link to Cath Kidston's site on her blog. I love Cath Kidston! So, I click over to Cath Kidston's site, find this fabric and think "ooooh! I could make cookies that look like this!" The resulting Mother's day cookies are shown above. I'll give them to all the mom's in my family. I'm thinking this palette could also be the inspiration for this years flower garden if I ever get around to planting it!