Jemma Wilson - Crumbs & Doilies

Welcome to Crumbs & Doilies! This might be just a recipe book to you right now, but to me it is an extension of our bakery and shop and Im so happy youre stopping by for something delicious.

Maybe this is your first time here. Maybe youve been here a few times and cant stop coming back. Maybe youve been dying to visit for ages and its finally happening. Either way, I hope youre going to enjoy yourself! You might be at the beginning of your baking journey with only a handful of bakes under your belt, or a frequent baker, who already has some skills and wants to try something new. Whatever your story, youll find loads in this book for you, from the basics and fundamentals all the way up to epic project cakes and everything in between. Weve filled it with our favourite bakes: some are unforgettable, unmistakable Crumbs & Doilies classics, and many of them are brand spanking new, just for you. Whatever you decide to bake, you can be sure that it is going to work, its going to be fun and its going to taste amazing!

Lets start at the beginning I developed a sweet tooth at a very early age, but I was always happy for my treats to come in packets and wrappers until an impromptu stab at baking while travelling in Australia piqued my interest. When I came home, I began baking at every chance I got. I loved the process of baking: the precision, the variety, the opportunity to be creative with flavour and decoration. Most of all, I loved to share the experience of a great bake with others. Id only ever worked in hospitality until then and giving people a great experience was my thing! Baking and sharing cakes felt like a truer, purer and more personal version of this. Seeing peoples faces light up mid-way through a bite of something Id made satisfied me on a whole new level, so it felt like the most natural move in the world to quit my job and start selling cakes.

Crumbs & Doilies began as a market stall on Brick Lane in April 2006. Id spent months and countless hours testing, tweaking and perfecting my cupcakes and brownies and I was ready! I packed up my old banger of a car (a blue Ford Fiesta with a hole in the floor, which meant my feet got wet when it rained) and schlepped over to the market stall to sell my wares, having frantically but lovingly baked them the previous day. By closing time Id sold out and, despite having sore feet, I was beaming!

Over time, my customers began to ask me to bake for their parties, weddings and events. I would scribble my number down on little paper doilies to give to people and it wasnt long before I was baking every day between market days to keep up with the orders. Sam, my partner at the time, had been helping out on the stall and in the kitchen, and in his spare time he built a website so that I could start selling cupcakes online. Soon the orders flooded in, so much so that Sam quit his job and came to work at Crumbs & Doilies full time.

Four years later, wed outgrown our home operation and having cupcake paraphernalia bursting out of every drawer or cupboard in our tiny flat became intolerable, so we moved to a commercial space in Wandsworth and built the bakery a 1,200-square-foot space that we rattled around in at first. It was a terrifyingly big move, but Sam and I were determined to grow our little cake stall into a proper business. We worked long hours, developed countless new recipes and grew our tiny team to help with our burgeoning workload. Using the best ingredients and baking in small batches, we would never let anything leave the bakery unless it was perfect. Slowly but surely, our menu and our reputation began to grow.

Sam had begun a Crumbs & Doilies blog a few years earlier. Social media was still relatively new, but we soon gained an international following of fellow baking enthusiasts, and people who simply enjoyed seeing what we were working on. We were slap bang in the middle of a lovely global community, largely made up of people who loved what we did, despite often never having seen, let alone eaten, one of our cakes in real life. When I was approached by Jamie Oliver to start a YouTube channel under his Food Tube umbrella in 2013, having met him a couple of years earlier, I had no idea how much that community would grow. But uploading my weekly recipe tutorials really seemed to touch a lot of people and it wasnt long before the Cupcake Jemma channel had over a million subscribers. Growing and being part of this worldwide baking community quickly overshadowed any reservations wed had about sharing our secrets with the world and we were thrilled to see people making our recipes, sharing their bakes with friends and tagging us in their photos.

Opening a shop had always been our dream. It wasnt just the appeal of a space that we could sell our cupcakes from, that wasnt a freezing cold or rainy market stall. We desperately wanted somewhere to call home, a permanent space that was totally us, where people could come and try our bakes (in the warm), enjoy a coffee and hang out with us! After years of baking, saving and searching, we were ready, and took the lease on a tiny shop tucked away on a cobbled side-alley in the heart of Soho. We transformed this once-shabby, poky nail bar into a perfectly formed cake shop, with a mini bakery upstairs in which we could bake everything fresh each day for our customers. In December 2015, we threw open the door, and since then its become a destination for people who make short and sometimes very long trips to meet the gang and try our cupcakes, cookies, brownies and bakes.

These days, Crumbs & Doilies has grown from just me and Sam to a family of wonderful, talented and devoted individuals, who work tirelessly across our HQ bakery, the Soho shop and, more recently, the Cupcake Jemma studio. Many have been with us for years, like Sally, Nikki, Dane, Rosie and Kevin, and the bakers, the front of house gang, office peeps and delivery drivers, both past and present, have all played a huge part in making Crumbs & Doilies the success it is today. The wheels keep turning thanks to the relentless efforts of Sam, helped enormously by our long-suffering but endlessly hard-working friend and colleague, Sally. You may also know these two to be a huge part of the Cupcake Jemma channel, with Sam being the one behind the camera and Sally often being in front of it with me! We have grown through sheer determination and hard work, despite me having no formal training in baking, neither Sam nor I having any experience of running a business, and with no bank loans or investment at all.

I hope our story encourages you, not only to bake, but also to push on and follow your passions, even if you think you dont have the credentials. At the very least, I hope you have fun baking from our book, are inspired to take what you learn and trust yourself to experiment with new ideas, and that it encourages you to connect with people through your baking. You are now part of our community and its the friendliest, tastiest place on earth!