Old-school baking can still cu

Can old-fashioned cookies like grandma made be profitable? They certainly can, writes Liz Clarke, if you combine creativity with good business sense

WHEN you get to the Sugarloaf Centre, to the left of the Old Main Road towards Botha’s Hill, there’s a distinctive aroma of newly baked biscuits. A few twists and turns and you find yourself in a small baking kitchen where a lot of things are happening.

It’s here that I meet an entire gingerbread family, plus a bustling gathering of Minions, a collection of Beatrix Potter rabbits and a scattering of cute kitties.

At the helm of the cookie house is mother Lynne Cook and daughter Jen Black. They have forged a scrumptious, exciting cooking niche with their label, Ginger and Joy, applying recipes cobbled together using new and traditional ideas.

Seated near them, icing nozzles at the ready, are baking assistants Lungi Zulu and Pretty Mjikweni, whose dexterity and design knowhow are something to behold.

There is one thing you soon realise when you chat to Cook about her baking business and how she started. She is profoundly deaf.

But if you think this challenge has held her back from making a career for herself and her family, think again.

“Being deaf is a bit of a problem,” she says with a gentle smile, which speaks volumes about her determination not to let disability become a negative factor.

“I have been deaf since the age of six. Nobody is really sure why because there is no deafness in my family. It could have been a virus that damaged the hearing nerves, who knows?”

But lucky in a way, she explains, that having experienced hearing and speech at a much younger age, she was able to speak normally, cope with her disability and go to a normal school – “with help from my friends and teachers”.

Now aged 50, a mother of three daughters and a grandmother to Jen’s baby, Hunter, the deafness has become more pronounced, which she admits, is “a bit of an irritation when I need to talk to clients or find new business opportunities.”

That’s when daughter Jen, 27, in between assisting her mother with the questions being asked, describes the journey they have taken over the past three years.

“Since I was a child, my mother’s baking and creative icing talents have been a beacon. When money was scarce, we were able to sell her cookies and biscuits at the old Shongweni Market to help with the extras.

“So, later, when her home was overflowing with biscuit orders, I persuaded her to take the next step and open a small bakery,” she says.

“Terrifying,” quips Cook. “But if I was going to get anywhere, I had to bite the bullet, buy the proper equipment and employ people to help with the baking and decorating process.”

While Cook is the creative force that turns biscuits into a magical Hansel and Gretel kingdom of nursery characters, slip slops, hamburgers, dinosaurs and angry birds, Jen has used her marketing and business diploma to keep her mother “grounded”.

It’s all very well, she says, to produce works of great beauty and imagination, when the cost of the final product means you have not made one cent.

“She’s right,” says Cook. “I don’t have a business brain, so when a client asks if I can do this or that for a price, I tend to say ‘yes, of course I can’. That’s when my daughter steps in and says ‘no, you can’t, not for that price’.”

It’s this fine balancing act between artistry and sound business sense that has taken the mother and daughter business combo from a handful of orders for friends and families to a fully fledged round-the-clock business with a distinctive cookie brand – “with the purple label” – into 15 Spars and numerous smaller outlets.

Baby showers and birthday parties are their core business. So too are celebrations like Christmas and Easter.

“That’s when the creative juices are at full throttle,” says Cook. She is particularly proud of her kit idea, which is a gingerbread house that children can decorate with the help of mum.

“We can’t make enough of those.”

In business there must always be a next step even for baby owls and a herd of black and white calves.

That next step, says Cook, having tested their new ranges at the Shongweni Farmers’ Market, is to have a shop front where the passing traffic can see what they do.

For this, they accept, they might need a much bigger frog.

For more information, visit the Ginger and Joy Facebook site or contact Jen on 0724557065