Friday Friends - Local Makers - Bickie Blessings

Hello dear readers, welcome to a new edition of Friday Friends! What a busy week it has been. There has been sunshine and rain in my part of the world - how has the weather been where you are?

This week it is my great pleasure to introduce to you all, two very talented  Friday Friends and Local Makers - meet Irma and Christine of Bickie Blessings.  

These lovely ladies create cookie treats that seriously look too good to eat! I just these pretty feminine cookies, they are just so so gorgeous. 

These sweet flowers are beautiful and I bet they are tasty too, and they won't give you hayfever *wink*

These tool kit cookies are just wonderful - for the tradie or home handyman in your life? So unusual and very creative.

Dear readers, I will now hand you over to Irma, to tell you all about The Bickie Blessings Story. Have a fantastic weekend, see you on Sunday for the weekend blog post xo♥

The Bickie Blessings Story

Who are we? Bickie Blessings is a partnership between two friends, Christine and Irma. We love spending our time baking and decorating. We developed the love for baking cookies when we were little girls in pig tails and ‘helped’ our mums with rolling out and cutting shapes. Now that we have ‘grown up’ we have even more fun baking and decorating cookies for all occasions! We could say with total sincerity that this is one of our favourite things to do, although seeing the delighted look on our customers’ faces when they see their cookies for the first time, is also one of our favourite past times :-D

How did we get started? About 4 years ago Christine was sitting at my (Irma) kitchen table and spoke with great awe and admiration about a website called the Adventures of Sweet Sugarbelle. She couldn’t stop talking about this American lady’s incredible creations and suggested that the people in Albany would surely appreciate decorated cookies like that. 

We decided to get better acquainted with royal icing and ‘foreign’ cake decorating terms like flooding, piping and marbling. Our first attempts were decorating Christmas cookies as Christmas gifts to friends and family. We enjoyed it that much that we just wanted to try out other themes as well. About 3 months after that we had been granted the opportunity to sponsor 80 heart-shaped decorated bickies for a Christian ladies camp and decided it would be a good way to ‘feel out’ the public. Shortly after that we started to bake and decorate cookies for orders. 

At that stage we both felt that it is something we would rather do as a hobby and all our proceeds went to charity. Christine was being a good wife, a mother of two teenage boys, and working part-time; I was being a good wife, working and studying part-time. 

From the beginning we hoped that our cookies would simply be a blessing to others. Whether you just look at them, or indulge in them, our biscuits are meant to bless because a blessing is love in action or form. Our business tag line is: “The key ingredient is love” and ‘love’ is also listed first on our ingredient label. Christine and I are both South African and we really liked the Aussie term ‘bickie’ for biscuit. And so Bickie Blessings was born. 

Our current sources of  inspiration? Something I need to mention is that cookie decorating is BIG in America. We have spent many hours surfing websites in absolute admiration – it is impossible NOT to be inspired by these talented ladies. There are so many wonderful decorators who generously post their beautiful creations on the Web with YouTube instructions on how to do specific techniques, such as montreal confections and  
the bearfoot baker. 

As we became more confident with decorating,we realised the true fun lies in the expression of our own ideas. We are inspired by the different orders we get from our customers and the different themes for different markets. It is not only the source of our inspiration but the challenge behind it that drives us to make each biscuit as special as possible. Some examples are 

"Wedding Theme" 

 "Sea and Shore"

This particular order was for a young lady’s pre-wedding party who loves spending time on the beach.

 "Girly Birthday Party" 

Christine loves decorating custom-made birthday hampers. Whenever she gets an order for someone’s birthday, she would ask about the things that are important to them e.g. what they like, what kind of job they do, special interests, favourite colours, sports team, holiday destinations/places etc; to capture the essence of that person. Christine would then translate the elements that are particular to that person into a very unique birthday hamper. Below are some examples of the lovely hampers she’s made.

What events are coming up for us? We are very excited about the Anzac Centenary event that will be held towards the end of 2014. There is a selection process for stall holders and we hope to be selected. There are also 3 shops in Albany that are stocking our bickies – Reeves on Campbell, Yellow Bird in Middleton Loop and the Christian Bookshop in Shoppers Arcade in York Street. 

Our future plans? Bickie Blessings had been a hobby and a charity business until the end of 2013. However, since the beginning of 2014 we realised that we cannot keep up with the demands for bickies. Christine has taken baking and decorating on as her her primary occupation. I am doing this part-time. We still sponsor selected orders for charity, or give the proceeds of specific orders to charity. 

We have big dreams and plans for Bickie Blessings. We know that Bickie Blessings is able to bless in various other ways. 
For instance, we would like to create jobs for aspiring biscuit decorators or school leavers wanting to fill a gap year, or the mums that would like to earn an extra dollar or two. These are our dreams and we would love to see them realised. Until then, we will keep building our brand, our beloved Bickie Blessings.

Dear readers would you like to see more? 
You can keep with all the latest on Bickie Blessings here: 
http://www.facebook.com/bickieblessings