How it all began

So here it is, my blog! I dont know much about “blogging” but thought I would give it a go!!

I am often asked how I got into cake decorating in the first place! It’s something I often think about as it was quite by chance.

In 1992 I completed my finals for my Biochemistry degree which had taken 5 years of day release. Instead of like the rest of my colleagues who had finished their degrees, who were all looking forward to no more college, home work etc. the thought of all this spare time scared me! I am still even now no good at doing nothing or relaxing.

I had a morbid interest in my family history, and I still do! It’s something I work on when I am not making cakes! So I found an evening class in family history at a nearby Adult Education Centre. I was so looking forward to this, but with a couple of days to go the course was cancelled due to lack of interest. Apparently I am/ was in the minority of people who want to find out about “dead people” as they are known about in my house!! So having made one cake before in my life, I decided to replace the family history courage with a “beginners cake decorating course”!!!

When I say I had made a cake before, that’s not entirely true! I had made cheese scones in cookery at school and added sugar instead if salt. It was politely mentioned to me that I should not do GCE (I am showing my age) cookery!

I had made a cake for my mums birthday that year to cheer her up as she had been in hospital. It was a pig cake! Two bowl cakes covered in pink fondant with 4 marshmallow as trotters! And that was my basis is for my cake declaring career!!!

I started night school at Gravesend Adult Education Centre and then Dartford over 2 years. Then like many things in my life I got a bee in my bonnet about City & Guilds! Doing it properly and having a certificate! So I enrolled for that too!!! That was a big commitment bearing in mind I was single, working full time and travelling a lot for work. The the course interfered with my social life as it was a Friday night for 2 years starting at 6.30 until 9.15!!! I would rush home from work, shower, get dressed, made up etc and then drive like the clappers to Maidstone Adult Education Centre some 25 miles away, turning up all ready to go out with my friends clubbing later that evening. Far to glam for 3 hours in the kitchen!

The course was quite intensive. The first year we made no cakes, it was all theory and design. We had to do a number of designs boards all reflecting different themes, and once we had completed them we were in year two able to move on to the cake decoration part. In our second year we had to produce a number of exam pieces. I think it was 12 and they included a royal iced cake with collars, modelling, tea cakes, novelty cake and a gateau that I can remember. All very labour intensive and a lot of work as all the designs had to be agreed before hand, cakes made and finished in front of the examiner. Bearing in mind I worked as a scientist this had a major influence on my boards and cake designs. Viruses etc. have great structures and I remember vividly making my gateau exam piece a hexagonal shape with various chocolate segments based on the shape and structure of the Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV).

It was here that I met my friend Claire, and this is when Iced Images was originally born. We were both working full time and loved decorating cakes and had visions both of us giving up work and opening a shop and making cakes for a living! Little did I know that that was still a 20 years away.! Claire and I made lots of wedding cakes together as Iced Images for a few years until we decided that in 1998 that our lives were taking us in different directions so we closed Iced Images down.

However in September 2012, Iced Images reopened as my new occupation with me as sole trader, but that’s another story!……