We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Emily Friend a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Emily, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I started baking cupcakes and cakes when I was living in Costa Rica and ended up opening a cake shop there a few years later. As I tried to figure things out like how to get buttercream frosting really smooth on cakes, I was frustrated by the lack of information I could find online. YouTube videos seemed to skip over the important details like at what angle to hold your cake comb and they didn’t show the boring details that were essential for mastering a technique. Fast forward five years and I’d grown and sold my cupcake shop, moved to Los Angeles, managed a few bakeries and had a baby. On maternity leave I started making cakes again and remembered the lack of truly step-by-step cake decorating tutorials and, eager to find a way to stay home with my baby for longer, decided to try to fill that gap.

Emily, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I never expected to be a cake decorator! I studied Law and decided that wasn’t for me so moved to Costa Rica to teach English instead, where my love of desserts led me to start baking and eventually open a cake shop. A few years later I decided to combine my love of teaching with cakes and started to film and edit videos showing different techniques for decorating cakes. My goal with my YouTube channel and online cake school is to show beginners how to use basic tools or even what they already have in their homes to make stunning cakes, and how to develop those skills to make cakes that look (and taste!) professional. My favourite feedback from students is hearing that I shared the tiny details that they couldn’t find anywhere else and that made the technique possible for them.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Not to do anything just because everyone else is doing it. After living in several different countries as a child, when my family moved back to England I never felt like I really fit in. I was desperate to make my accent sound like everyone else’s and to learn how to play the sports they did and for many years I thought my goal was to follow the same path of university and then a career in London. So that’s what I did and as soon as I got there, realized it wasn’t what I wanted at all. It wasn’t until fairly recently that I stopped being embarrassed to admit I studied Law but now decorate cakes for a living!

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

When I started filming my cakes my dream goal was to monetize those videos but I knew it would take a long time to get there. For the first year I took custom cake orders to fund the ingredients, tools and materials I needed for filming and I crammed everything into my baby’s nap times and after bedtime. Then after a year I was able to monetize my YouTube channel and I started selling cake decorating courses online, which meant I could stop making cakes for other people and instead create exactly what I thought would perform best online. Two years year later my income from cake videos was enough to pay for childcare for my then two children, which was a huge milestone because I finally had blocks of several hours of uninterrupted time to dedicate to content creation. Now it’s my full time business and luckily I still love it just as much as when it was a side hustle!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.britishgirlbakes.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/britishgirlbakes
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/britishgirlbakes
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/britishgirlbakes