We all have our areas of expertise here at appetite HQ. Mine happens to be cakes (and chocolate, and sweets, and…well you get the point), which means that there is no one better suited to popping along to Hexham to catch up with Kristy Giblin, the girl behind the fantastic Pudding Parlour.
It’s a bit early for cake, really. But the kitchen is in full swing and there’s a white chocolate and Amaretto cheesecake in the little Pudding Parlour shop-come-kitchen (I make note of the cheesecake to remind me to purchase a large slice for a post-lunch treat).
Kristy and her brother Greg are working on the last of the morning’s deliveries and discussing the imminent opening of their second shop, in Sanderson Arcade, Morpeth. It’s very, very busy.
“Things have really moved quickly in the last couple of months,” Kristy explains as we grab a seat. “We’ve got a contract to supply Fenwick and opening in Morpeth any day now. Things are a bit full-on.”
Things have been full-on since Kristy floated the idea of making cakes, mainly for friends and family, on Facebook in early 2014. “I had never planned to open a pudding business, let alone with my brother,” she says. “I had baked with my mum when I was little, and she was really good with savoury baking, but I caught the bug for cakes and tray bakes when I was pregnant with my daughter Anya, who’s two now. I suppose the business was born out of a pregnant woman craving cake, really.”
Craving sweet food coincided with a particularly bad winter which had Kristy at home watching TV cookery shows. “I would watch those shows and think about how I could adapt what they made. Then I started to experiment and improve. Once you start baking, it becomes quite addictive. You can create something in quite a short space of time, and as an impatient woman, that’s ideal!”
She then started making desserts for Sunday lunch at her mum’s. “I had family and friends telling me that the cakes were good enough to sell so I thought I’d test it out. I set up a Facebook page with my four best puddings on it – Creme Egg brownies, Ferrero Rocher cheesecake, cookie dough pie and Mississippi mud pie – to see if anyone was interested in ordering one. I had 20 orders in the first week.”
The Pudding Parlour now has more than 5,000 fans on Facebook and those first recipes remain popular in Hexham and at Fenwick in Newcastle and they can’t make the Ferrero Rocher cheesecakes fast enough. “We have 63 regular bakes and another 500 which we slot in and out,” says Kristy. “Everything we do here is unique, so we have to go through a process of testing and tasting – which is a perk of the job!”
Greg doesn’t share his sister’s sweet tooth, “which means he doesn’t eat any of the profits,” Kristy laughs. Partnering up with her brother was never the plan, but one day Greg stepped in to help with the growing order book and it happened from there.
“My mum Carol works in the shop a couple of days a week,” Kristy explains, “and my husband Rob and dad Billy help out too.”
In the first year of trading, Kristy and Greg have blown their business plan out of the window, so they’ve had to re-evaluate. “The plan is to grow our business in Hexham, Morpeth and Fenwick, as well as adding to our trade business. From there, we’ll start exploring the idea of setting up franchises across the country.”
Time for cake. I buy two boxes filled with slices of different ones. I may have eaten a milk chocolate Oreo cookie in the car on the way back to the office, and there may have been a big chunk missing from the custard cream cake 10 minutes after I landed back at my desk. As for the rest…well, they’re history. It’s a tough job, but…
