Charlotte O’Toole aka Bakeorama is known for her eye-catching and OTT cake creations. Formerly serving up her bright bakes at Home Sweet Home in the Northern Quarter, she’s now taken the leap into working for herself and moving into her own kitchen. Time Out Manchester had a chat with her about her plans and her reasons for the move.
Anyone who has been into Home Sweet Home in recent years couldn’t fail to miss Charlotte’s creations. Her huge, bright and decadent cakes covered in ornate, abstract and often outrageous decorations, have led to Charlotte making a name for herself in Manchester and beyond.
She took the leap into baking in her late twenties when she trained as a pastry chef and has spent the last three years at Home Sweet Home where she’s been leading the kitchen and developing eye-catching – and delightfully Instagrammable – desserts.
But now, as Home Sweet Home prepare to open a second site at Great Northern Warehouse, Charlotte has decided the time is right to go it alone and open her very own kitchen.
‘I was due to move over to the new site with them,’ she explains. ‘But I had to decide what was best for the brand. It was a hard decision but all signs are pointing to me doing the right thing.’
Although she says there was an aspect of the fear of the unknown, she’s now got her own kitchen in Chorlton. It’s nearer to her home and making the move to working for herself has allowed her to take some precious time off to recuperate, regroup and come up with some new ideas.
So the big question is - where will we now be able to get Charlotte’s creations?
She’s got big plans in the works. One area which she’s particularly keen to be more involved with is pop-up events and collaborations with supper clubs such as The Drunken Butcher and street food traders - working with as many people as possible is her aim. Her cakes will also be available for delivery via Deliveroo, after they trialled working together during Manchester Food and Drink Festival and found it worked well – with offices in particular keen to get her cakes brought to them.
Cake orders are also important to her business, in particular alternative wedding cakes with couples giving her free reign, and she’s also been involved some consultancy work to design menus for other people.
Although she’s in a new space, her bakes will still keep their trademark OTT designs. All of the plastic toppers are handmade by her mum so there’ll be no let up on the design front (‘I don’t know where she gets her ideas,’ Charlotte says while showing me a picture of her mum’s latest concept – festive lions complete with antlers) and it’s not all about the appearance – ‘there’s no point in it looking good without tasting great’, she adds. That’s how she keeps her customers coming back for more.
‘People travel to get my cake – that’s so flattering. It’s great that people are so loyal,’ she says. There’s also plenty of interest in her hometown of Liverpool and she’s keen to do menu design in other cities. She admits there is just too much that she wants to do but she’s keen to take it one step at a time.
Her eventual goal is to have her own bakery and milk bar in the city centre and publish her own recipe book. But for now she’s taking it slowly and focusing on what she loves - baking.
See more from Bakeorama on Twitter and Instagram.
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