A slow start to a new year.

The very first year that I started baking (for profit) we had very distinct business periods. I was the most busy in the summer; when people are gathering together for graduations, birthdays, weddings, etc. About mid-fall, things began to die down and eventually, during in winter I didn't do much, if any business. Then in the spring, things started to pick up again.

2011 was my second year of business. I can say I was a lot more busy and it lasted the majority of the year. But again, once winter hit orders started to slow down. I'm sure there are a lot of reasons for this. I have a baker friend who is also self employed and she says that her busiest time is usually the winter. BUT, she doesn't take any orders during the summer so she can spend it with her family and she does a lot of candy making and other things whereas my focus {right now} is mainly on cakes.

Looking at my calendar, I can already tell you that 2012 will have more orders than 2011. And that's just based on what is already ordered. {I'm so happy to say that!} So...what was the point of me telling you all of that? Well, if you've noticed, I haven't been posting very often lately. This is why. The idea of this blog was to share my baking adventures and creations but if I don't have any orders, I have nothing to share.

On that  note, our pastor did just celebrate his birthday and I volunteered to make a cake. Actually, the way it happened, our church had a planned fellowship dinner that I signed up a cake for. After I signed up, pastor mentioned that his birthday was 2 days after the fellowship so he was turning it into a birthday fellowship. My original idea was to do a plain-jane cake. Probably Tiramisu since I haven't made one of those in a while. But now that he mentioned his birthday, I felt the need to adjust the cake. Not to mention, the fellowship was on New Year's Day. So, how do you make a New Year's Day birthday cake? All of the designs I had chosen were either too much New Year's or not really birthday. Plus, I felt the need to top last year's cake:

(Inside joke: Pastor is an avid hunter so I felt it necessary to do something along those lines)

This year's cake, because it happened to fall in between paychecks and a week after Christmas I didn't have much money to spend on it.

And for those of you wondering what Tiramisu is, it's an italian dessert, usually consisting of lady fingers soaked in coffee and layered with a mascarpone filling. I've never had lady fingers but I've heard they are rock hard (but soaking in coffee would correct that). I've adjusted the idea of Tiramisu to fit into America's idea of "cake". My version is a coffee flavored cake. It is brushed with extra coffee when assembling. Filled with marscapone filling and then covered with a coffee flavored whipped topping and sprinkled with cocoa powder and shredded chocolate bits.  Occasionally I will also line the sides with rolled wafers but that is more for appearance sake (but the wafers taste great too). IT IS DELICIOUS! Seriously...if I didn't care about all the calories, I could probably eat 3-4 slices  per day. We have one church member that is known for cutting his slice to equal about 1/3 of the cake.