From small beginnings

Welcome to the blog, and indeed my very purple kitchen after which it is named.  Amazing Bakery started many years ago as a whimsical thought on a dull day.  A picture of a pretty bakery full of the most delicious pastries and treats, cakes that were sculpted and shaped like they never had been before.  A divorce from the world of frumpy fruit cakes and stolid icing.  Two foot tall dinosaurs and pink castles rising up from the fondant, dressed in flowers and fronds.  Unfortunately real life rather got in the way and the bakery was put on hold for far too long.  

But dreams are not so easily forgotten, and slowly, like a princess waking from a one hundred year sleep, the dream is rising again.  I have never forgotten my training, nor has my love of food and in particular pastries and cakes waned in the slightest.  This time real life was the trigger for events.  In 2010 I fell ill with Viral Meningitis.  Not the nicest of things to endure, and certainly not something I would recommend.  But this illness was to prove a massive turning point.  Not least of all because I collapsed and ended up in the Intensive Treatment Unit of my local hospital spitting out a lot of tubes.  It was scary, and it took me a while to shake off the whole having had my brain boiling in my skull thing, but that was not to be the end of it.  Sadly Viral Meningitis is an enterovirus.  As we now are starting to understand enteroviruses are the start of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis.  Or ME as we more commonly call it.  My life was in tatters. I slept at odd hours, I ran out of energy just climbing the stairs, I shook, twitched, panted and gasped and my whole world as I knew it fell away from me.

In rapid succession I found out who my friends were and that I could not live my life as I had previously done.  I had to pace myself, I had to allow for days when I could do nothing, sometimes weeks or months where I was too exhausted to do more than sleep.  I had to realise that if I spent energy I had to either save it up first or pay for it afterwards, and pay the hard way at that.  Obviously this was never going to be a tolerable situation for an employer, and I hardly blamed them. 

But it was from these shards that the idea rose again.  A bakery.  Not a shop, but now that the internet was everywhere (yes, I am that old) one that was in my own home.  I had moved house to the coast shortly before I fell ill and one thing that simply wouldn't work was what had been left me in the form of a kitchen.  Old oak cabinets that were badly hung, greasy and worn, slashed about pieces of worktop and half ripped up laminate flooring.  It had to go.  A dear friend who had recently redone her own kitchen pointed me at B&Q, my local DIY store, and within it we found an amazing purple kitchen.  Deep purple draws and pull out cupboards that made storage easy and accessible.  Coupled with fuchsia glass cabinets lit from within, black Metro tiles on putty coloured walls, sparkly black marble worktops and a new range cooker I was in kitchen heaven.  

The dream was coming alive again; I could see myself in there, cooking up a storm.  And best of all it could be as small or as large as I could cope with.  I could work on things at my own speed, decide which orders I wanted to take depending on how my energies were balanced, it was going to be perfect!  And it is...

So, if you'd like to follow me on the rest of the journey, as I build my business brick by tiny brick with a lot of naps in-between, then tag along.  Amazing Bakery has a Twitter at @AmazingBakery and a website at AmazingBakery.co.uk which will be up and running very soon.  All I can say is, watch this space!  And let's hope it's all upwards and onwards from here!