Ashley’s Sweets & Treats
My name is Ashley and I am the owner of Ashley’s Sweets & Treats. I never intended to create a baking business but somehow that is the path I wound up on. In February 2020 I started watching YouTube videos so I could learn to make a cake for my sons third birthday in March. I quickly fell in love with it and spent all my free time watching videos. I started to practice and share what I was learning on my personal Facebook page. After a month I decided to start a group as I had a lot of people asking me about what I was doing. My group quickly took off and people started asking me to make cakes for them. I continued to work on my skills, and still do every day, and started to introduce other items to my menu. The second item I started making was cakesicles followed by macarons after a lot of people requested them. I now have quite a large menu including a variety of items. 
For someone who had never baked from scratch and didn’t know a single thing about cake decorating, I never imagined I would be where I am now. In January 2021 we began construction on a full second kitchen in our home and on March 2nd, 2021 the kitchen was inspected by public health. Passing that inspection was one of the proudest moments of my life and with it came a business license from the City of Hamilton. I believe that my story, being self-taught and showing people that you can teach yourself something new no matter what your age is (I was 37 when I started!), is what attracts people to me.
MY Facebook group has grown organically to over 1,700 people purely from word of mouth. My calendar is fully booked 4 to 6 weeks in advance and all my holiday menus sell out in less than two hours. I am so grateful and blessed for the community support I have received and shockingly I made the move to resign from my career as a police officer with the Hamilton Police Service at the beginning of September. It is both the scariest and most exciting decision I have ever made but I know it’s right for my family and I. I hope to continue learning and growing in both my skills and my business and to see where this journey continues to take me.
Ashley Lee