A Delicious Gift

This was one of two cakes gifted to me by one of my friends at work. I had helped him and the team with a big project and it took up a lot of time, and he gave me two gorgeous little cakes to say thank you.

I think he knew that I would enjoy photographing them as much as tasting them, so he insisted I bring them home, rather than share them at work. You can read about the work stuff after the photos if you are interested.

This one is a cheesecake with strawberries on top and encased in a very tasty tempered chocolate. Just divine. It was perfect.

Now onto the work stuff…

My role has become quite fluid. I manage Marketing and Public Relations for our company, which is both very creative and very numbers-driven. I create all of our marketing materials, digital and print, and manage our social accounts. I write articles, interview clients, design email campaigns, but I also run promotions and marketing campaigns which require a lot of preparation by way of analysing how our various services are performing, and then reporting on how effective the campaigns were (by analysing more numbers). I also prepare our pricing and work out discounting, and lots of other things …. so many numbers!

We’ve had a rough couple of weeks at work. A number of last minute non-negotiable projects were thrown at us which caused a huge amount of work on top of our usual pretty hefty workloads, and the team tends to turn to me for help with reports – I think they know I like numbers and I’m very quick at manipulating them into useful data, so I end up doing quite a lot of it, as well as checking and proofing things before they go up to management.

Hence the cakes 😊

It can be difficult to reconcile these two parts of my job. One is super creative and the other is very analytical. The good (sad) thing is that I love both sides! I really enjoy numbers and analysing data and working out what’s happened and what might happen and how we’re performing. But I also love creating articles and flyers and graphics for our marketing campaigns.

The numbers are infinitely easier for me. It’s second nature to me to look at a list of numbers and figure out how to present them. What’s challenging is to take an idea for a promotion and convert that in an engaging visual thing. It’s such a satisfying result and I love it. But it’s also an incredibly creative process and I find that I have to “get in the zone”. It’s very difficult for me to get back in the zone when I’m pulled out of it. It really does feel like a physical thing to be pulled out of that creative place. It takes me a moment to switch out of it. And it annoys me to get pulled out of it when I’m on a deadline, because it can be hard to get back in.

…

Ok, enough rambling from me for now. There will be another post with the second cake. I haven’t eaten the other one yet, so I can’t comment on how it was. But don’t worry, I’ll rectify that problem before the next post 😋

x desleyjane