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Hello there! Thanks for stopping by to check out our truly delectable website 🙂

The more observant amongst you may have noticed that this here blog thingy hasn’t been updated in, like, FOREVER. Ah, yeah… ‘life’ kind of got in the way.

imageMmmm, cake.

Sorry, we got distracted.

Where were we? Oh yes… we’ve been a little too busy *cough* eating cake *cough* holding family baking workshops, running children’s cake decorating stalls, fundraising in all manner of exciting ways, hosting socials for our fab-u-lous bakers, being interviewed and photographed, writing annual reports like proper grown ups, judging cake competitions like Mary and Paul, and, above all else, fulfilling the birthday cake requests that come in from brilliant referrers for brilliant children so that they don’t miss out on having cake and being spoilt on the special days in their lives.

In fact, guess what? This is pretty major news so you may want to hold onto your hat if you’re wearing one. We’ve now baked over FIVE HUNDRED cakes for children who would have otherwise gone without. Now that’s a total we can be proud of. Yay!

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So if we’re a little quiet on here, you can be pretty darned certain that it isn’t because we’re quiet in real life. Oh no. And we’re always Facebooking and tweeting what we’re up to so come and say hi over on those other corners of the tinterweb. We love it. Especially if you ‘like’ us!

Right then. Better get on with life…

We’ll leave you with some pictures from a fun little baking workshop we recently ran for a group of Hackney young carers in conjunction with Action for Children as part of Carers’ Week. These kids had it all sussed. They smashed the microwave mug cake recipe (no bananas, thanks, and woah, woah, woah, they weren’t touching a sultana!) and stormed their cake decorating challenge. Actually we’re thinking of retiring and leaving them to run this show.

Laters!

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On why you sometimes see scribbles on our cake pictures

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From time to time, when we put cake pictures up in our gallery here, or over on twitter, Facebook and Instagram, you’ll see they have ‘scribbles’ on them. Like this, this and this, for example…

FCFK - bunting iced cakeFCFK - chocolate star cakeFCFK - star cakes for twins

The scribbles aren’t because the baker’s flown into a rage with a tube of writing icing, or because we’ve let the toddler loose with the crayons, it’s because we’ve – rather crudely on a rubbishy picture editor app – edited out a child’s name. Ok, so we won’t get a job airbrushing Kim Kardashian’s thighs for Elle magazine, but at least we’re safe in the knowledge that the children we bake for have their identities protected. Twitter isn’t interested in who that incredible dinosaur cake was baked for; the cakes still get love on Instagram without us sharing the child’s name; and the likes keep coming in on Facebook regardless of the back-story.

We didn’t adopt this policy until about a year ago, but publishing names wasn’t ever something that sat comfortably with us, and after a discussion with one of our bakers – who happens to work in family law – we just knew if was the right decision to make.

People know that we bake birthday cakes for kids who would otherwise go without and that’s enough. And to the child it doesn’t matter where their cake comes from. We don’t need the families to shout about us. We don’t care what parents or carers tell their children. At school drop-offs, classmates could believe that their mate’s mum popped by with a cake. That’s ok. The children might not give a cake’s origins a second thought so long as it’s got their favourite superhero or colour on, or they might start believing that there’s a birthday cake fairy. That’d be nice. The point is, it doesn’t matter.

Life’s tough enough for many people already and the last thing they want is the fact that they’re struggling highlighted for all to see. It’s taken some time for us to build up the level of trust and understanding we have with many of our referring bodies and we don’t want to do anything to jeopardise that. We want families to be able to come to us if they need our service without worrying that others will think badly of them for getting help. That’s what we’re here for.

So we’ll keep on scribbling on cake photos where necessary. And while we’re more than happy to share what makes us and our organisation tick, we’ll honour our commitment to never share anything that would compromise the identity of the children and families we work with. That’s a promise.

Tell your mum, tell your mates, tell the world… we’re in the Telegraph

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It all started with a My Little Pony cake. It was a pretty spectacular My Little Pony cake it has to be said. A My Little Pony Cake of dreams, made for a besotted Hackney birthday girl back in November by our baker Jennie.

Clouds on the outside; rainbow on the inside; bedecked with said pony (“Rainbow Dash” for those of you who know your cartoon nags): it was a cake which, by the power of the Twittersphere, turned a few heads.

One of those heads belongs to Leah Hyslop, an online editor at the Telegraph who, it turns out, had dabbled in a bit of My Little Pony appreciation in her younger days and, though her tastes have matured considerably, later confided to us that she’d be happy with a cake as beautiful as that one on any of her adult birthdays. Who wouldn’t?

Fortunately, Leah doesn’t just have good taste in cakes. She’s lovely (which always helps), and she was happy to have a chat with us over a nice cup of tea with a view to writing a piece about what we do for the Telegraph. The result of that chat and a couple of interviews with two of our bakers (thank you Anna and Shell) have now been transformed into the essence of us. Truly. If we wrote for the Telegraph we would have written what Leah wrote. But we don’t, of course (in our dreams!), so instead we’ll just point you in the direction of a bloody brilliant article… which just so happens to be about us! Thank you Leah, and not forgetting My Little Pony.

FCFK - Telegraph article