Welcome to another Monday on the blog!  Today I am featuring the lovely Karen who owns Sweet ‘n’ Pretty here in my hometown of Sydney.

While Karen makes gorgeous cakes today I am featuring some of the stunning cookies as part of my month of cookies and biscuits for October.    Here is what Karen had to tell me about her business and love of creating.

I owe my love for cookie making to the ‘world wide web’.  I stumbled on some amazing images of cookies about 2 years ago that I had never ever seen before and given my major problem with OCD (hahah) it was a challenge that I really wanted to take on and after starting to make them that very next day I have just gone from better to better.  There is an infinite limit to the ideas of new cookies and of course my lovely customers also come up with orders or things they want.

 I started cake decorating around 25 years ago after being inspired by my mum who used to make lovely wedding cakes just as a hobby.  I took a few cake decorating courses and was encouraged by my teacher to enter my first Christmas cake at a local show and I won first prize in the novice section. I made a couple of cakes for family and friends, but then it was all put on hold for a few years whilst I had a family.  So further down the track when the kids had all left home, I seemed to drift back into making cakes for family and friends again, but they seem to have gotten a bit better along the way and thanks to my daughter Jayde – the lovely creator and owner of Little Paper Lane – who totally encouraged me to do it as my own business – I did not seem to look back.  So I picked Sweet ‘n’ Pretty as the name and it went from there.  So I am pretty well self taught and love to find new ideas for cakes.  I love the prettier cakes, and try to avoid novelty cakes.  So now I am at a point where the cookies are taking over the cakes.

I was approached quite a while back by a lady who used to come into Little Paper Lane (I help my daughter out for 2 days of the week) and we got talking about The Day of Dead Cookies and how much she would like to order some, so I went home and put on my thinking cap and searched “www” for sugar skulls and there was another world full of them.  They absolutely fascinated me as it was just going to be an extension of my love of ‘doodling’ on paper.  My sugar skulls would have to be my fav cookie at the moment and I can see as I compare them from when I made my first skull cookie to the ones I am doing today and there is no comparison.  I just recently completed an order for sugar skull cookies for Samantha Wills to use as her media release for her latest jewellery which included skulls.