Having her cake

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CATH MYERS THOUGHT she was just lending a hand when she volunteered to help make party food for her niece Yasmin’s fifth birthday; little did she know that an afternoon of baking would change her life. “It was a girlie party, so I decided to make vanilla cupcakes and top them with pastel-coloured butter icing and matching sugar flowers,” Cath says. “They were so pretty when they were all sitting together; I looked at them and thought, ‘This is it’.”

What Cath saw when she admired the plump little cakes was a great idea for a business. Eighteen months later, that flash of inspiration has morphed into My Little Cupcake, a company that has just opened a shop in Sydney’s Neutral Bay, caters for private and corporate functions, and still sells at the local markets, where it all began.

The jump from kitchen to boardroom has been a heady one, but Cath and her business partners Andy Allegaert and Christopher Ojala have little time to gloat. Idle time is a luxury for the trio – they are the chief cooks and bottle-washers of this outfit. They make the cupcakes from scratch, using a ‘secret recipe’ passed on to Cath by her maternal grandmother, and cook them in a commercial kitchen rented on a needs basis. Up until November last year, when they opened the shop, the icing was still carried out in the tiny kitchen of Andy’s apartment in Sydney’s Inner West.

The pace has been relentless, but Cath says she has never been happier. “I’ve always wanted my own business,” she says. “I started an accounting degree when I left school, but hated it and left after a year.” Her mother was horrified when Cath then announced she was going to study millinery, even though she herself was a milliner by trade. Although Cath loved hat-making, particularly felt hats, she found it hard to make ends meet and did bookkeeping jobs to pay the rent… until she rediscovered her grandmother’s cupcakes.

The response to the glamorous little cakes is always instant, and gushing. “We seem to touch the heart strings. It’s an old-fashioned feelgood product,” reflects Andy, who has a background in marketing, and was approached by Cath for help soon after her inspirational moment. The long-time friends were excited by the potential of their homespun product, but the reality of producing it en masse hit home soon after they formed a partnership in August 2004.

“We started out selling at three markets [Kirribilli, Mosman and St Ives in Sydney] and not long after were approached by someone from the Easter Show, who asked us to do a booth,” says Cath. Andy and Cath were intrigued by the offer, though a little apprehensive. “It was a big risk because we’d never done anything on that scale before, and we didn’t know if we would break even,” she recalls. “In the end, it was a lot of hard work – we had to get family and friends to help us. It was a huge learning curve.”

Cath concedes that she is a respectable cook, so long as she has a recipe. “As a kid, I loved making cakes and lamingtons with my nan. And my stepfather, Don, was a cake decorator,” she says of her culinary heritage. Don put Cath in touch with an icing expert, who now makes the sugar flowers that crown each cupcake, and while her grandmother is not around to appreciate her legacy, Cath believes she “would have been rapt” by My Little Cupcake’s success at the Easter Show.

Cath’s older sister, Diane, who enjoyed the prototypes of My Little Cupcake at her daughter Yasmin’s birthday party, was just one of the army of willing workers who pitched in for the show. “It was crazy,” she recalls. “Mum, our friends and I were icing up to 1,200 cupcakes a day.”

Diane and her family were also recruited as official taste testers before the cupcakes were first launched. “We gave Diane and her husband, Craig, cupcakes that were four or five days old, and asked them to report back on their freshness,” laughs Cath. And still they want more. “I help out on some Saturdays and Craig gets very upset if I come home empty-handed,” Diane reports.

My Little Cupcake has a loyal band of customers, and still receives calls and emails from people who were first drawn to its cakes at the Easter Show last year. The company’s stand there lured hundreds of visitors in with its confetti colours and butter and sugar aromas, and went on to win a gold medal for its display.

After the success of that first public venture, Cath and Andy were suddenly faced with turning their hectic hobby into a viable enterprise. In July 2005, they consulted Andy’s former business partner, Christopher, and soon afterwards, the partnership expanded to three. “I helped put the company into business mode,” explains Christopher, “to market it and get more corporate business.”

The shop is vital to the company’s growth plan, too, and the fact that demand for the cupcakes has not yet slowed is encouraging, if somewhat exhausting.

Cath works seven days a week and is often up until 11pm answering emails and filling orders. The 39-year-old is remarkably cheery for someone who gets little time off, although, “I’m always whingeing to Andy that I have no life,” she laughs. Ultimately though, she knows it’s worth all the hard work. “It’s tiring, but I wouldn’t be doing anything else.”

Cath says she continues to derive the same joy from her cupcakes as she did when she first made them for Yasmin’s party. “I look at them when they’re all boxed and think, ‘they are so beautiful’,” she says. “I still get that buzz.”

Where are they?
My Little Cupcake is located at 62 Ben Boyd Road, Neutral Bay, Sydney. Visit their website for more details: www.mylittlecupcake.com.au

Words: Melisande Clarke. Photography: Andrew Lehmann. Hair & make-up: David Novak-Piper.