About Me
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 son’s third birthday in March. I quickly fell in love with it and spent all my free time watching videos (and I mean every single free second, most nights until midnight or 1:00 am!). 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 introduced were cakesicles and these took off like crazy. All of my “official” first orders were cakesicles and there was no going back after that. I then took on the hardest task, trying to figure out macarons. From there my menu has grown to include well over a dozen 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 (Ashley’s Sweets & Treats VIP) has grown organically to over 1,700 people purely from word of mouth. My calendar is fully booked 4 to 8 weeks in advance and all my holiday menus sell out in less than two hours (thanks to my amazing customers!).
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 2021. 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 am so excited to see how this continues to grow and how it challenges me along the way.