Blog

Each month we will feature one of our talented customers and share with you their story and tasty tips.

Cake Crumbs - with Luke from Black Velvet Sydney

Luke from Black Velvet Sydney

1. How did your baking journey begin?

I very much stumbled into baking after many years in management consulting. I got involved in Black Velvet Sydney by assisting a friend build an eCommerce site for the store, and ended up buying into the business a few years later. Throughout this process I have learned a lot from the staff as well as many hours watching youtube videos and being mentored by the best in the industry.

2. As a cake decorator, what do you feel are the benefits of using edible images?

It would be very unfair to call myself a cake decorator as my skills are limited, I'm more of a cake enabler - finding or developing the skills in my staff to make the cakes our clients request. Edible images provide many benefits, including creating very personalised cakes, for example, the inclusion of edible images of photos of loved ones, as well as logos for corporate clients. The technology allows us to quickly turnaround designs for our clients.

3. What’s your favourite type of cake to create?

I love working with my team on something new and challenging. Over the years we have given ourselves bigger and more complex challenges, which forces our team to push themselves to the next level, which we all get satisfaction (and exhaustion) from.

4. What’s the strangest/funniest cake you’ve been asked to make?

Admittedly we haven't had that many strange requests over the years. As for funniest, it would definitely be our children's cakes where we're creating cute unicorns or animals for the cake - we have a lot of fun making 'cute' things.

5. What’s your best tip for wanna be cake makers/decorators?

Incredible attention to detail, the food industry, unfortunately, is very unforgiving. And make sure you're giving the client what they want - if you want to be in business, you're there to serve. I definitely appreciate the artistry of the industry, but to be commercially successful you must be providing what the market wants.

6. What is your all time favourite cake making tool?

Haha not a tool as such, none of our creations would be possible without the Black Velvet Team for sure, so it's my staff who are my favourite asset.

7. Do you have any tips you can share when either printing or applying edible images?

Edible images are such a robust product, we've never experienced issues with application. My biggest piece of advice is make sure you're well stocked with ink and paper and you keep your printer well maintained, as you never know when a massive quick turnaround order will turn up!

8. What is your career highlight?

There are too many. We have massive corporate highlights - for instance over 25,000 corporate cupcakes around Australia, luxury highlights - like our cakes being flown on private jets to resorts and our team are flown up to assemble them. But I think the biggest highlight is that almost all our clients have been incredibly supportive of us through massive growth in the past year and want to see us succeed even more, nothing is more supportive or motivating than that.