My Summer Range is here...

This post is about shameless self-promotion. As much as this was meant as a personal food blog, my website's still being built, so I don't exactly have a destination for these just yet.

January's been quite busy for me---if you're new to the blog, I decided back in 2009 that I was tired of sitting around waiting for opportunities to come, and went on to start my own baking business, albeit on a part-time basis. One of my new year's resolutions was to take this venture as far as I could, and to seize every opportunity that presents itself to me. That would explain how I chose to begin this post.

I'm turning these Crumble Bars into Crumble Pies range --so you can eat
them straight out of your hand.

Sampler Box I created for the cafe people

Part of building the website required me to write a section that describes who we are, and what we stand for. I've written a number of press releases, essays, and papers in the past, but this has to be the most difficult piece I've had to write. First of all it made me look into the set of values that I personally want for the business, plucking them up from the chaotic abyss of my thoughts and then stringing them into pretty little sentences to make my ideas comprehensible. Second of all, it's a deeply personal thing, putting my heart and soul out for judgment. I mean, should I even be writing this way for this business-related post? Am I digging a deeper hole when I mix business with personal, emotions with ambition? My position as the owner of a tiny business trying to make a dent in the big world makes me vulnerable enough to scrutiny. Do I really need this?

But then I think back to all the blogs that I love, and I thought about why I, and thousands others, keep going back to those same ones. And I realise that it is because the writers of those blogs don't just post about things----they post about emotions. The ups, the downs, the good, the not-so-good, and sometimes the truly awful. They give their readers a chance to know who they are. So to hell with it.

On another note, I'd like to make mention of the process I undergo to create each product that you see in the photos. I know that I'm not the only person who's jumped on the 'fresh, seasonal and local produce' bandwagon, but there's a difference between working with seasonal produce for the sake of working with it, to actually taking the time to study and develop suitable ways to best showcase their extraordinary quality.

I never simply place a piece of poached fruit on top of a pound cake and call it a new product. If I ever do that, you can be rest assured that it is the best way to enjoy that cake, and because we would have explored and tested other ways, only to find that to be the most ideal. Even though I am young and still have so many things to learn---about produce as well as the pastry arts---I take the word 'artisan' in Treehouse Artisan Sweets very seriously. I can only hope others will too.