Let them eat cake!
In August 2014 we had our 10th birthday and throughout the coming year we’re asking our customers and volunteers to help us celebrate by baking a cake and having a party in honour of our first decade.
Luto’s Universal Birthday party kit
We’ll be sending people one of our hand crafted birthday boxes which contain Luto’s Universal birthday party kit which comes complete with a cake mix and enough party supplies to light up elevenses and add a treat to any tea break. We’re asking all those who take part to send us a picture or video clip of their party which we will share here for all to see. Keep popping back to this page to see who has been cooking up some fun and joining us on our mission to make some global birthday party bakes.
User testing
As we’re experts in user testing we’ve been doing a lot of experience prototyping (baking and eating of cake that is) to make sure we get our birthday boxes just right. We’ve tried a fair few cakes in the name of quality and taken the whole affair very seriously even recruiting a younger demographic to our testing team to make sure our birthday box meets everyones needs.
We had a budget to keep to for this campaign and as our birthday boxes were being mailed out to people across the globe they couldn’t be too heavy. We sampled Betty Crocker’s Devil’s Food Cake (seen below with added rainbow sprinkles) which was scrumptious and her Vanilla cup cakes (courtesy of Laura Butterworth, Senior Project Manager) which were eminently shareable but her icing is a weighty extra and comes with an additional cost making our boxes too heavy and blowing our budget right out of the box.
Quality approved
Continuing our search for the perfect cake we were interested to find that there had been a 44% increase in sales of ‘cheat’ cakes since The Great British Bake Off hit UK screens and that baking aficionados had been busy reviewing instant mixes against the skills of the master bakers. The Morrisons Victoria Sponge came up trumps with a 7/10 for ease, 9/10 for taste and found to be moist, light and not too sweet – and great for starter cooks. Weighing in at under 500 kg with all ingredients included this was our champion and became our birthday party box cake of choice with an interesting history to boot.
Kirstin Blackwell, Luto’s Head of Business Development stepped up to the plate and with some early morning baking creating this fine example (above, right) which underwent rigorous sampling by staff at the weekly team meeting. Reviews were lip smackingly good with a second sampling required by more than one.
February 2015
Getting the party started
We worked hard over the weeks to keep the birthday celebration idea under wraps from Theo. As co-founder of Luto we were keen to let him be the first to open one of the birthday boxes and get the party started. We used a little bit of cunning and invited him to a meeting to discuss what we might do to celebrate our birthday and to his surprise we sat him down in front of a video camera and gave him the kit in a box. He gave a great performance.
March 17, 2015
Let the baking begin
As promised (caught on screen above), Theo baked his party cake that we presented him with and celebrated with a slice pictured here with Sharan, Kirstin and Leah (left to right).
March 19, 2015
Bob Dylan takes a minute to wish us a happy birthday
We’ve been busy posting our birthday boxes and getting a great response and a few unexpected surprises. Giovanna from Forte Medical sent us a few delightful celebration gifts back in the form of MP3’s. We couldn’t let this one hide away in our inbox for long and have shared here for you to enjoy too.
Happy birthday everyone!
“Happy Birthday” from Theme Time Radio Hour – Young and Old by Bob Dylan. Released: 2007. Track 27 of 29
April 2, 2015
