HOT on the heels of winning back-to-back Best of St Helens awards, Antonia’s Cakes is on the move.
The bakery business claimed St Helens’ Best for Desserts for the second year in a row and officially serves the tasty treats in town.
Lauren King launched her home-based cake making business in 2015 before moving to the Duke Street premises in 2020 but they will open the doors of their new premises on Gerrard’s Park this Saturday with a host of special offers and giveaways.
A slice of cookie pie
Lauren said: “It’s been a long time in the making but we’re finally moving to a much bigger bakery – we can’t wait.
“The new bakery will have a brand new shop where we will continue to stock our popular freshly baked goodies.
“We have free parking outside, which is something we didn’t have on Duke Street, and this is perfect for customers picking up large cakes and click and collect orders.
“To celebrate the move, we’ll be giving away free treats to the first 150 customers through the door this Saturday.
“We’ll also be hiding golden tickets inside 20 of the free boxes with prizes like free brownies for a year and VIP cards as well as free treat boxes, free dipping boxes and much more.”
Lauren, who is 35 and was born and raised in St Helens, has always had a passion for art and design and has a degree in fashion and textiles.
She was a young mum at 21 and being at home for a year, when her first baby was born, she started baking again – something she’d done as a child.
Special occasion cakes are a speciality
Lauren, who is mum to Esme and Elijah, said: “I’d done a lot of baking with my grandma when I was younger.
“I found that making cakes allowed me to do something creative and I started to apply things I had learned during my degree to designing cakes.
“Things just took off from there as I started to make cakes for friends and family.
“Word of mouth recommendations meant I started to pick up more business and I set up an Instagram page and website.
“We never expected to outgrow our home kitchen so quickly so opening a shop and then a larger bakery was a huge achievement for us.”
Lauren made and sold handmade clothing online during her time at college and university and worked freelance as a costume and wardrobe designer on sets while her son was still tiny.
She says she picked up her business acumen along the way.
Brownies, blondies and cookie pies as well as cupcakes and rocky roads are always on the menu at Antonia’s Cakes but their best-selling bakes are NYC cookies, which are chunky and gooey cookies topped with chocolates and sauces and they’re all baked fresh in-store each day.
Biscoff cookie pie
Lauren said: “Moving to the bakery will allow us to take on more staff and to continue to grow the business.
“We have a few things lined up this year that we want to start offering, such as increasing the range of products that can be purchased on our website and collected the same day or next day as well as a range of products that can be posted with next day nationwide delivery and catering for large-scale corporate event orders.
“We’ll be launching a Christmas menu and products online over the next few weeks so keep a lookout for more details!”
The new shop will be open between 10.30am and 5pm on Saturday at Gerrard’s Park, College Street.
For more details go to facebook.com/antoniascakeshop
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