Truly Scrumptious

You’ve heard of wedding cakes, birthday cakes and now with times changing we can introduce you to a new type of cake which is not so happily themed…

Baking for the Queen is no piece of cake. Just ask Paul Bradford, co-founder of Linlithgow-based designer cake shop, Truly Scrumptious who has created several sugar-sweet masterpieces for Her Majesty over the years. “When the Royal Yacht was decommissioned we were asked for a cake of the Queen and Prince Phillip in a rowing boat rowing around the Scottish Isles”, he explains, “Another was a corgi peeing against a tree! The story being that the Queen had planted a commemorative tree and her corgi had proceeded to pee on it!”

With the Queen among their customers, Truly Scrumptious are currently leading the way in Scottish cake design. In September 2009 Paul was awarded the coveted Disciples de Escoffier in recognition of his creative talent and the business has been nominated in the Cake Designer category of the Voted Outstanding Weddings Supplier Awards every year since they were introduced. The petite Linlithgow store (also part-owned by David Brice) is filled with displays of gorgeous fondant delights, all so perfectly handcrafted from the finest local ingredients that even Nigella Lawson would be amazed by them. Among the stunning creations on display include a Jack Russell replica which looks so realistic you’d be forgiven for giving it a pat on the head!

Specialised cakes are regularly ordered for many occasions – traditional examples being weddings, anniversaries and birthdays. However, Paul and David refuse to work within these constraints and are more than willing to embrace less conventional, more unusual requests for their customers, including the most recent American trend to infiltrate the UK market, “We get a wide variety of design requests” reveals David, “Divorce cakes are on the up with one lady asking for a cake where her former husband was lying on a coffin while she plunged a knife into his back!” Charming…whatever happened to days of ‘till death do us part?!

With business flourishing, Truly Scrumptious decided to cash-in on the trendy haute cupcake craze by opening their very own Cupcake Bar in July and, as David reveals, it has been a huge success: “Our Cupcake Café Bar is our flagship and is now, just in five months, bringing in far more turnover than all the other parts of the business put together! We opened on the 10th of July without too much publicity, hoping that if we started quietly then we could get our systems in place allowing us to grow steadily. However, the day we opened there were queues right down the path to the car park and there have been queues almost every day since!”

It was a simple stroke of luck that secured Truly Scrumptious a lucrative concession contract with retail giants Jenners when a traffic jam saw the department store’s head buyer stuck outside their former premises in Corstorphine. With nothing to do but admire the beautiful cakes in the window, he was inspired to make a phone call which sparked a rewarding relationship between the two. However, unwilling to allow quantity to supersede the quality of their products, Paul and David made the admirable decision to close down both the Jenners and Corstorphine branches to focus their attention entirely on the Linlithgow store: “Quantity began to overtake quality in the importance stakes. After being in a darkened room for a couple of hours and re-examining our core values and business plan, we felt that quality was far more important to us”, reveals David. The fact that the pair apply such strong moral principles to their business comes as a rare but welcome change to the increasingly non-personal ruthless nature of the retail industry.