Treats and Tales

How I became a self-taught baker – The journey to Treatlane.

Hi, you can call me Lola, I am an IT professional by day and self-taught home baker by night. I started out baking as a hobby and distraction. Ever since I was a kid, I loved cooking and baking… I enjoyed baking the most though, lol! My mum loved and still loves to cook so I guess I got the flare from her. Making cakes commercially however, didn’t start until 2011, I was in Nigeria at the time and surprisingly, things picked up pretty quickly. I made cakes, breads, cookies, and local Nigerian snacks and pastries.

I first started out while in school for a second degree and my first challenge was meeting the expectations from my circle as it seemed to few well-meaning family and friends like it wasn’t the right decision because of the education that I have, everyone expected that I’d get a corporate job… which I did, but I also wanted to run my own business. All I needed was an oven and baking tools… or so I thought…

“Never despise the days of little beginnings“

I saved up money to purchase my very first oven and that felt like my greatest achievement at the time lol! but you know the saying, to “never despise the days of little beginnings”. A lot of my baking tools in the beginning belonged to my older sister who also loved to bake (it runs in the family lol!) Anyways, I was determined to make hard to resist cakes and treats that were both visually appealing and taste wise awesome! I worked mostly at nights and was such a perfectionist!… still am. Youtube was my friend day and night haha!

I practiced so many recipes and gave them out to friends and neighbors, got feedback and used that to perfect my recipes. I quickly became popular (people love free stuff and I used that to my advantage) in the end, it all worked out because, by the end of my first year in business, I was getting orders from outside the town that my bakery was, all thanks to supportive friends and family who saw my potential made donations, plus some of the money I had saved up was used towards renting my first shop.

“so I relocated“

Along the line, there was the need for me to relocate to the United States, so I relocated. This meant that I had to close up my bakery after 3 successful years. After relocating to the United States, there were challenges and being a new immigrant was also in the mix, but, undefeated I decided to brush up my skills, learn and practice new recipes, gave out free samples, received feedback and fine-tuned my recipes before I decided to start making cakes commercially… from home (talk about passion). The whole experience has been equally as challenging as it has been exciting. I’ll be talking about the challenges in another post (phew!). Starting out here in the United States was less challenging but that’s probably because I had been down that road before and I knew what to expect and how to handle things. However, I had to challenge myself to learn new recipes and the kind of treats that are popular here, I had to make myself understand that even though there’s a market for me here among Africans I needed to push to have a broader market where my products would be purchased by other ethnic groups.

“I finally came up with Treatlane”

One year after getting here, I realized that someone else started to use the same name I had been using and already bought the domain name… I was truly pained because it was a pretty catchy name! I figured I needed a new name for my bakery, I had to start over and move quickly with buying my domain name and have it registered so no one else could use it. After many days of being mad about the old name, and running to my computer to search up a name I thought was unique only to find that it’s been taken, I finally came up with Treatlane. I remember feeling so at peace when the name came, and sure enough no one else had it, aha!! I bought the domain www.treatlane.com and registered the name with my State.

Treatlane makes wedding cakes, birthday cakes, cupcakes, cookies, cake pops, french macarons, breads, meatpies, beef rolls, scotch eggs, fish rolls, puff-puff, aaannnndddd the list is endless.

Check out the following link for what these deliciousness-es are and what they are made of at https://treatlane.com/treatlane/. I digress, I hired someone to create a website and they pretty much disappeared with my money… another story, but! happy happy happy thoughts only, so I have been building Treatlane website by myself, bit by bit whenever I can squeeze out time (usually at the middle of the night *cries a little*).

Treatlane cakes are known for its not too sweet, rich, airy, fluffy and flavorful taste. I do not compromise on quality ingredients because they give the outstanding results you can only get from Treatlane products. Treatlane is also known for its Nigerian culture infused savory snacks with delicious sweet, savory and buttery pastries that just melts in your mouth and literally take your tastebuds on a treat lane… pun intended haha!

I hope you follow me on this new journey as I blog and share some of my recipes, techniques, and document past, present, and as they occur, future experiences on my journey as a self-taught baker. It’s going to be fun!

Cheers!