From amateur to professional baker: how my passion helped me start my own business

I found my passion for baking when I was 12. My mother was a single parent who worked two jobs just to keep the custody of me and my younger brother (9 at that time). She was mostly out of the house and we had to fetch food for ourselves. Even when my mom was home, she didn’t really cook (she was a terrible cook btw). I started to learn to cook primarily from internet and youTube, but soon I realized my real muse was baking.

The first thing I tried was a molten lava chocolate cake, and it turned out better than I had expected. My younger brother had a sweet tooth and loved all the desserts I used to make for him. As time passed, my baking skill became more and more refined, when I was 21, I started to sell muffins online. It started out small, but due to good quality of my products, soon there were more orders coming in. At this point I haven’t realized if I want to go with it being a serious thing, because I was baking and selling as a hobby. To decrease the traffic, I raised the price of muffins, as I thought people would not buy muffins from an online business at such high price.

To my surprise, I still got 11 orders for my chocolate ganache muffins. Nevertheless I fulfilled the orders, and send a small hand written note thanking and requesting for a yelp review. By now I was making Custom muffin boxes at home myself and it significantly increased the cost. After 3 days I saw first four reviews of my business on yelp. Customers were happy with the quality and taste of muffins, but they loved the box and handwritten note.

After these four (five star) reviews, I got an order for a birthday party who wanted 200 muffins, I was about to cancel the order as I wasn’t prepared for this kind of response. I talked to my brother about it and he was the sensible one, he said he would help me with the baking, and I needed to stop cancelling orders as it might earn a bad name. He also placed order for 50 custom muffin boxes with a packaging company, who were selling the boxes on wholesale rate (a few cents per box). He showed them design of my custom box and they said they could make similar boxes.

Anyways that was my first big order, and after that, there was no looking back. My brother and I started our bakery business, and we’re doing great so far. We still get our custom muffin boxes from the same company and these boxes are a part of our brand identity now. Bakery packaging boxes is one of the best packaging companies and I would definitely recommend them.