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Since encountering Pinterest last year we have set up our own Vanilla Pod Bakery page and even downloaded the app on to our bakery iPhone! We have boards set up for our Vanilla Pod cakes, as well as idea boards for weddings, parties and even Christmas.

It is so easy to use, all you need to do is set up an account and your ready to go. We have downloaded the "Pin It" button to our browser, so when we see an image we like we simply click on the button and "Pin" the image to one of our boards.

We definitely think it is a fabulous website to use and is especially handy if your a bride-to-be. We use Pinterest with our couples to build a virtual image of their individual wedding, so we can understand what they want their special day to look and feel like. It allows all parties involved to be inspired by a whole host of ideas from around the world. As a cake designer, it then is fantastic to take colours, patterns and other various elements to design a cake that is completely unique to the couple.

We are finding more and more of our brides and grooms-to-be are bringing tablets/ipads with them when they come for their tasting consultations and a lot have already embraced Pinterest.

I whole heartily recommend Pinterest as a wedding and party planning tool. Please fill free to follow us and/or re pin any of our images. If your not on the site already, why not sign up - we guarantee you will be hooked!

"Help! How do we choose a wedding cake?"

This is a question we often hear and we understand that if you are new to an area this can be a mind field as you won't know any of the word of month recommendations from the locals.  Well, it's time to relax, and dust all those scary thoughts away. The brilliant wedding ideas blog, Pip and JoJo researched exactly that question and a couple of months ago had a lovely evening with Pia at The Vanilla Pod Bakery delving into the world of choosing beautiful wedding cakes.

To read Pip and JoJo's blog and interview with The Vanilla Pod Bakery click here. All the wonderful images were snapped by Pip's fiancé James from Pictures&Pianos.

During the interview Pip asked Pia to share her 5 top tips to think about when choosing a wedding cake designer and designs for your cake. You can read all of tips on Pip and JoJo's blog but our ultimate one would be to think about the number of guests you would like to feed.

Top Tip - Think about the number of portions:
The number of portions to a cake can change the overall style dramatically. For example, you may want a 5 tier wow factor cake but you only have 80 guests, alternatively you may want a simple three tier wedding cake but have 200 guest, don't panic all this can be catered for. A good cake designer will suggest many options including dummy tiers to add hight to your cake (honestly your guests would never know!) or a "kitchen cake" to increase the portions, that would be exactly the same flavour as your wedding cake but with no thrills and would never leave the kitchen before being served.

  

This Easter weekend we held a cake giveaway competition on our Vanilla Pod Bakery facebook page and were blown away with the response we received from it. Over 180 people entered and shared the post! The winner was picked at random the next day at 9:30am and the lucky person collected the cake on the Saturday afternoon.

The Cake

The lucky winner and her husband

The little cake was a 4" round Belgian Chocolate sponge with pale blue fondant icing and the intricate design was based on the works of a world famous jewellery designer from the 1900s.

The Cake

In recent months I have been extremely inspired by this designer and have been busy sketching lots of new fabulous cake designs, which I will blog about shortly.

Can you guess who the designer is?

The other week we were commissioned to make a birthday cake for a fan of the Cheltenham Town FC football club (the robins). We had great fun creating this birthday cake, though the scarf caused a few problems! But we had lovely feedback from the client saying "Thank you so much for the delicious cake. Trevor was thrilled to bits".

If you are followers on our Facebook page then you may have noticed an influx of pretty powder blue cake designs. We simply love this colour. Plus we are super excited as this is the new colour for Vanilla Pod Bakery. We will be launching our new website in a couple of weeks and can't wait to show it off. But in the mean time feast your eyes on some of our pretty power blue collection.

We love the Cheltenham Festival at the Vanilla Pod Bakery. We love the excitement it brings to the town, and every year myself and my friends take a day off to attend the prestigious races. So you can imagine my excitement when Paddy Power contacted me and asked the Vanilla Pod Bakery to make pre festival branded cupcakes for the staff at Cheltenham Racecourse. I was over the moon!


Horse meat has been 2013's biggest scandal so far and with that in mind Paddy Power requested that we brand the cupcakes with "Caution May Contain Horse Meat (only joking)". I thought this was an hilarious play on current issues and happily let Vanilla Pod Bakery brand the cupcakes.


We delivered the cakes on Monday morning to the Cheltenham Racecourse reception and then popped a snap of the cakes on our Vanilla Pod Bakery facebook and twitter pages. The reaction was very funny - people loved it and it went viral!

However, I am not sure the big racecourse bosses appreciated it! But it was a fantastic bit of PR for Paddy Power it got people talking and sharing their brand through social media.

It was a real honour to work with such a high profile brand, we even got invited to Paddy Power's box on Ladies Day and it has definitely paved they way to work with other well know brands. We had a great experience with Paddy Power.

I have just got back from teaching a group of lovely ladies how to ice and decorate pretty birthday cakes using a spirit level, buttercream and sugar paste at Centre Arts, Cheltenham. The Vanilla Pod Bakery pre made the sponges the day before and the students learnt how to decorate their own individual 8" round birthday cake in 4.5 hours. Most of the students were complete beginners and I was extremely impressed with all of them. Their cakes all looked very professional by the end of the course.


A very enjoyable day was had by all and now I can't believe we only have two more classes left until this term is over, it has simply flown by! Our new term starts in October 2013. We will be introducing two more classes and extending our most popular 'Roses and Swirls' class by one hour. It's all very exciting.