Lots of people dream of setting up their own successful and creative business from home. Cake Pop Princess Bianca Benn from Gravesend sort of fell into it.
The mum-of-two, 35, was working at a travel agent when she found a recipe online for cake pops –a hybrid of lollipops and cakes - in October 2010.
Now she crafts bespoke and quirky pops for kids parties, special occasions and corporate events for the likes of Jimmy Choo and Virgin Atlantic.
Recalling her first ever batch, Bianca said: “I made them. They were really ugly.
“I posted a picture of them on Facebook and a friend of mine said ‘Oh my gosh, you should sell those’.
“Another friend then asked if I could make them look like princesses she would have some for her daughter’s birthday.
“I had never even heard of cake pops as characters. They turned out pretty well and I started selling on the forums – mum to mum.”
Within two months, business had boomed to the extent that Bianca’s Cake Pop Princess business went full time.
She said: “Every day is different, it is always a bit of a challenge and it is always interesting.
“People ask you to do some really strange things.”
Among the cartoon characters and cars, pirates and princesses, Bianca has been asked to make ‘different’ cake pops such as pickles and even vaginas for a woman’s vaginoplasty celebration.
Bianca's One Direction cake pops
Her biggest commission came last month when she was asked by the producers US chat show The Late Late Show to create cake pop likenesses of host James Corden and guests One Direction to feature on the show.
She told News Shopper at the time that she was “jumping up and down all day”.
Bianca credits the turn-around in her career to getting into the cake pop craze at the right moment and product itself – their size makes them easy to post around the world and the recipe gives them a shelf life of two to three weeks which is much longer than cupcakes.
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She said: “It is an instant mail order business. At the time there were only a couple of English people doing it.
“I managed to get in at the exact moment they got popular. Clearly I had a knack for it.”
She added: “I was not actively looking for a job. It just snowballed really quickly.”
See more of Bianca’s cake pops at cakepopprincess.co.uk
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