As you will know here at Finom we love using flowers on our cakes and its important to us that they are edible.

Because it's wedding season I am going to start the series off with the most popular flower on wedding (and celebration cakes) which is of course the rose.

Now the shipping container has landed it needs to be framed up on the inside so we can line it, put in the doors and windows, and make it weather tight.

The first question I needed to answer was how to attach the framing to the walls?

One of the unintended consequences of going into your own luxury food production business is an unhealthy obsession with obscure and hard-to-find ingredients!

My current obsession is with sprinkles, and not the boring old hundreds-and-thousands from the supermarket, but the hard-core, top-shelf stuff that you can only buy online from overseas (I haven’t investigated whether there is a local black market for sprinkles although I wouldn’t be surprised if there was…). I’ve been on the lookout for amazing sprinkles for ages now and have finally found some – in Canada. So at the risk of sounding like a total addict, if anyone reading this is planning a trip to Canada and wouldn’t mind being my sprinkles “mule” I’d be ever so grateful! Have a look at https://sweetapolitashop.com to see what I’m talking about – one of my favourite websites, Rosie has the most gorgeous cakes on her blog and her sprinkles are TO DIE FOR!!

My desperation for sprinkles has reached such heights that I’ve even started making my own – which is easier than you might think and quite a bit of fun. Check out http://sugarspunrun.com/homemade-sprinkles/ if you’re keen to give it a try. Although, I must not get distracted from the business of making amazing macarons and building my very own commercial-kitchen-in-a-container (more of which very soon…)

 *side note:  if you do try making sprinkles colour them brighter/darker than you want them - they go lighter when they dry.

There are good ideas, and there are bright ideas, and to be honest, I’m not entirely sure which category my current idea fits into!

For over a year I’ve been using my home kitchen for my small patisserie business. With a young family this was often complicated, stressful and messy, so I decided to move a shipping container onto our land in Carterton and convert it into a commercial kitchen. 

There were several reasons I chose a shipping container over a purpose-built building. The first was that I wouldn't need to get building consent from the local council for the shipping container as it is considered portable, whereas with a building, anything over 10 square metres requires building consent. The other was that I have always liked the idea of using shipping containers as dwellings – too much time on Pinterest perhaps? I thought making my own container kitchen would be an opportunity to give a container dwelling a go on a small scale.

First steps involved figuring out just how I could go about creating my “amazing space”! I did a lot of research online and spoke to many local companies who modify containers but finally chose Boxman in Seaview, Lower Hutt. The prices all seem to be fairly similar but I chose Boxman because they were easy to work with and nothing was out of the question.

I asked Boxman to cut and frame three holes in the container – two windows and a door. I had decided to go with wooden joinery and found what I needed at local salvage yards and on TradeMe. We were ready to go!

Now all I needed to do was get the piles in. Easy, right?