10 Weird & Wonderful Happy Cakes!
And now time for something completely different! For some Friday light entertainment, Julia from Happy Cakes, has shared the most weird and wonderful bakes she and her team have made.
Happy Cakes is an awesome local businesses, and Julia has been a long running supporter of the indie community in Oxford.
Since 2009 Happy Cakes have been making thousands of cupcakes. Each cake is lovingly hand crafted in Julia’s Summertown kitchen using the finest ingredients available. No two orders are the same – as you can see from the breadth of creations here! >>
Bicester Village
Bicester Village has played a big part in Happy Cakes story. We traded there for 2 seasons from our cupcake trike and couldn’t believe we were selling out homemade cupcakes outside Gucci! We also baked 800 gift bagged shortbread and loads of huge cakes with the architectural drawings to mark the expansion of the Village.
Local Orders
Our motto is to say yes to an order then work out the logistics which can sometimes be quite mind blowing! When the Cancer Centre at the Churchill Hospital ordered 2000 cakes for their 10th anniversary it was our biggest single order to date. I’m extremely grateful to the Happy Cakes team and my friends who always step up to the mark. We’re very hugely appreciative that we get lots of repeat orders from local organisations and businesses and they support local indie traders.
International Orders
Every week we take lots of international orders especially for students studying in Oxford. Recently a mathematics professor from America asked us to bake loads of bundt cakes using a special cardboard origami cake pan and origami paper liners he had designed. He posted the kit and we had the cakes ready for his talk at an international mathematics and origami conference at Oxford University.
Special Orders
Rob asked us to bake a cake and cupcakes to celebrate him completing running 200 marathons. How is running that many even possible?
Baking For Friends
It’s always nice to be asked to bake for friends. This whopper cake was for a special birthday of a good friend.
Charity Christmas Cake
A chance meeting with Cathy from Oxford Foodbank has led to our annual donation of a whopper Christmas cake for the Oxford Christmas Lunch. This amazing event feeds around 600 homeless and vulnerable people. This is the fourth cake we’ve donated to them. Sara the organiser emailed after the event this year to say;
“One of the families I was very pleased to see this year was a single mum with a severely autistic teenager . When I talked to her about her fears of trying to go out with her son and her consequent depression and isolation I feared she wouldn’t be brave enough to come . She did and her son coped really well in no small part to the 3 slices of cake he ate (in fact your cake was the only thing he was prepared to eat!) Without doubt you made that families Christmas along with lots of others”
Keifer Sutherland
When the staff at the O2 Academy ordered cupcakes for Kiefer Sutherland we really didn’t expect any social media activity. We were greatly amused when Kiefer posted a picture of himself with his ‘welcome to Oxford’ cupcakes. It’s one that stands out and often gets mentioned by strangers.
Miranda Hart & Red Nose Day
Miranda Hart hosted a dog show for Red Nose Day which was filmed in Oxford so naturally we baked her some bone shaped dog biscuits. It was even more amusing that a couple of weeks after this her agent rang to order her some more!
Endeavour
Anyone who knows me will know I’ve been a fan of the Morse prequel Endeavour from the beginning. They frequently film in Oxford and are a wonderful bunch of very hard working folks. I love baking for them and always make a themed cake at the end of the season. This one marked the end of season 6, ‘The year of the moustache’. The cake even made it in to a national magazine.
The Power Of Cake!
We often joke about “the power of cake”. Last week we received this email from a Mum who’d ordered some cupcakes for her student son. >>
“As an aside, the cupcakes actually changed E’s life! He hadn’t made many friends yet when the cupcakes arrived. He realized he needed some help to eat them and found a person he knew from one of his classes to ask if he’d like some. That person said he was heading to a club sport and that E was welcome to come along and there would be more friends there to share them with. E went – He continues to play late night hockey a year later and those teammates who shared his cupcakes are his best friends (with whom he just spent the winter holidays). So, they were a big success!”
If you would like more Happy Cakes in your life, follow Julia on Instagram, and check out her Indie Oxford interview for more cake world inspiration!
Love,
Rosie
xxx
