If you've been walking around Caerphilly recently, you might have noticed a bright pink horsebox filled with sweet treats in the town centre's bandstand.
Inside, you'll find homemade cheesecakes, dessert jars and cheesecake-filled choux buns available in any flavour you could ever hope for - and it's all thanks to a local woman who took her hobby one step further during lockdown.
Although Jo Tipper, from Bedwas, had always enjoyed baking and decorating cakes, she never imagined it would become her full-time job within a few months of selling her first cheesecake.
The 51-year-old said demand for her desserts unexpectedly snowballed, enabling her to quit her job at a company that dealt with road traffic accidents for large vehicles. Instead, she went full-time with her business, The Cheesecake House, which she started from her home in October 2020.
"I was working at home because of the pandemic and I had a little bit more time on my hands," said Jo. "I was looking to change things as I'm getting to an age where I don't want to do the same job forever.
"I was in lockdown and starting to make some little treats for friends and I started making cheesecakes and it went on from there. It was spurred on by a friend who was leaving little doorstep gifts for us. I made cheesecakes and they went down well, but I thought the slices were hard to deliver so I found some old jam jars around the house and started putting my cheesecakes in those.
"I used to make wedding cakes and birthday cakes just as a hobby for friends and family, so I've always had an interest in it."
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Jo said as she started experimenting more, she decided to pick the brain of her brother, Stephen Jones, who works as a chef in Penarth. Together, the pair decided to partner up together and launch The Cheesecake House, with their respective partners getting on board to help out with deliveries.
"We launched a Facebook business telling people what we made and how they could order them," she said. "It started on a Saturday and people started ringing on the Friday night and making orders. The whole Saturday, I spent making these cheesecakes in jars and it took off from there."
Taken aback by the business' early popularity, Jo quickly realised she wouldn't be able to continue making cheesecakes in her domestic kitchen. So, in the run up to Christmas she turned her spare room into a commercial kitchen suitable for making hundreds of sweet treats every week.
She said: "That one day made it clear I couldn't do it from my kitchen because nobody else could use the kitchen when I was using it. I was working such stupid hours as well that I converted my son's TV room into a commercial kitchen in time for Christmas - and we had a load of orders in for that time of year.
"I realised it was something people wanted, people were wanting cheesecakes and wanted more quickly afterwards and then they were telling their friends who were telling their friends and it was just growing so quickly. I knew I couldn't carry on with the domestic kitchen. We sold everything from that room, had a tiler in the week before Christmas and generally made sure it was commercially viable."
She said things briefly quietened down after the Christmas period, leaving Jo wondering if things had peaked. However as soon as Valentine's Day came around things went "ridiculous", and they have stayed that way ever since - much to Jo's delight.
By summer 2020, Jo had gone full-time at The Cheesecake House, making the cakes from her home and selling them to order, as well as visiting markets and pop-ups around Wales. They have now also bought a bright pink horsebox as their mobile shop which will appear in Caerphilly town centre five days a week until Christmas.
"I gave up my job in the June and now I'm there full-time," she said. "We've just taken delivery of our horsebox, which is our mobile shop and that's going into Caerphilly shopping centre at the bandstand from Wednesdays for five days a week up until Christmas.
"We've got so many customers who have supported us around markets and pop-ups. It's nice that they have somewhere to go where there'll be a ready selection available. It's also perfect for festivals, for wedding hire and for parties - it can do so much."
At present, The Cheesecake House can make up to 60 different flavoured cold-set cheesecakes and cheesecake jars. Various pastries are also filled with cheesecake topping.
Jo said: "We have about 60 flavours. they're all cold-set, fresh cheesecakes which are really creamy and decadent and we flavour them with all sorts. We do every kind of chocolate you can imagine and we do all the different fruits. We do things like peach melba, raspberry and white chocolate and we do a couple of boozy ones like Penderyn liqueur. People can have them fresh to order either from our website or through Facebook, we also operate through CaerphillyEats.
"We do big birthday celebration wedding cakes, we do big cakes as well as small cakes as well as jars, we also fill patisserie items like choux buns, eclairs, doughnuts, scones and croissants with cheesecake."
Jo said said it felt "really fabulous" to see her business become such a hit with customers and that their positive feedback encourage her going forward.
"Your friends and family are always going to tell you how amazing your things are," she said. "But it's nice hearing people saying nice things about your cheesecakes when they don't even know they're your cheesecakes. I've heard people chatting in the street saying, 'have you tried The Cheesecake House cheesecakes?' and it's surreal. And seeing the comments on social media, it's just so lovely.
"It's a really unexpected treat that it's worked out the way it has. It's just nice, it's a family-run business, and it is so far, a success. It's enabled me to give up my job. The prime reason for doing it was that there might have been a chance some years down the line I could have considered going part-time or maybe considered giving up my job. I certainly didn't expect to be doing it within six months."
