So a few weeks of preparation, grovelling to the bank and mass expenditure saw me ready to go up to the Eve show on 30 November. The show was to run for 5 days so I decided to take all of my stock with me…..not really being able to gauge how much I would be needing.

 I run Cottage Cooks on my own but found a willing helper in the form of one of my nursing colleagues, Terry. She was going to come up for 4 days to help me run the stand and keep me company drinking wine in the evenings. Husband was charged with driving the van of stock up for me then coming back to look after the girls whilst I was away, hopefully making the first Cottage Cooks fortune.

So he came home with a big van which we dutifully loaded up and the three of us were all set to go. Jay was heading out first whilst I got together the last few bits and pieces. He set off but 5 minutes later, I had him shouting from the driveway. Thinking that some moron had cut him up trying to get the van out of our drive, I took little notice………until the shouting continued.

I ran outside and down the drive to find him slumped against a wall saying he’d been crushed by the van. I couldn’t quite grasp what had happened but as he fell to the floor, I figured that it wasn’t just a little bump and he wouldn’t be able to drive the van up after having some painkillers, as he first thought. In hospital later, it turned out that the van had crushed him and fractured his pelvis in 4 places……thank heavens for the presence of my trauma matron friend!

In a moment of self pity though, I watched my Cottage Cooks dreams flit passed me, just out of reach once again. The police came and impounded the van, with all of my stock in it so they could do safety checks and my big promotional ideas went down the drain. With no stock, a critically ill husband and nobody to look after the kids, I wasn’t going to get to Birmingham for this show.

It’s all very well running your own business and paying vast amounts of money for advertising. To me though, what really counts is when someone phones you up out of the blue and asks for details so they can feature your business in their magazine.

The first was Eve magazine (for non UK readers, it’s a Good Housekeeping type of mag for 20-35 year olds). They wanted some information on the individual cooking kits we do so they could feature them in an article on children’s cooking. That was great - just a paragraph about Cottage Cooks and the cooking kits, courses, cookie cutters and aprons, but it was written by someone interested in my business!!

Then a journalist from The Times phoned up - they were doing a feature in children’s cooking parties and wanted to know all about our “DIY” themed cooking parties as well as the individual cooking kits. Unfortunately, that article focused on one of my main cooking party rivals (who’ve been established for some years now) but Cottage Cooks still  got a mention as an alternative supplier. A little write-up  in the Times was certainly not to be sniffed at.

Following on from the Eve magazine article, they then contacted me to see if I wanted to take Cottage Cooks to the first Eve Style Show at the Birmingham NEC in December. I was torn as it sounded fabulous but was costly for the stand and my previous experiences of shows weren’t great. But I figured it would be a great time to show off some fantastic products……..after all, a cooking kit or cooking course is a perfect gift for the kids who have everything!!

Close to the end of my first year, I had children enrolled on my course but nowhere near enough to make it profitable. It was make or break time so I decided to invest in a website and www.cottagecooks.co.uk was made, thanks to a wonderful man called Pete Weeks at Daneswood Solutions. He must have dreaded my phone calls and e mails asking really quite dozy questions but answered them all with good humour!!

The children’s cooking courses were good but I didn’t feel they were enough to base an entire website around so I racked my brains for what else would grasp kids imaginations (and their parents too!) and want to get them cooking. So cookie cutters, cake cases, pretty & practical aprons were added to our online store, along with a new range of individual cooking kits and cooking parties.

I was thrilled with my new website but the traffic didn’t exactly pour in so over the months, it got tweaked and adjusted. As a small business, I didn’t want to invest everything in the site but with hindsight, that’s what I should have done.

Another year of pottering along then a problem came up with the license on the e store. So Pete got back to work and rejigged the site into a much more workable format to give me www.cottagecooks.co.uk in the format it is today. The time helped me to learn various aspects of running a website and as I became more proficient, the business expanded.

I finally started to believe that I could really make a go of it……..it’s very easy to lose faith when you run a business on your own, inspite of backup and support from friends and family. That took us to September 2006.

The idea was in motion - I’d planned the contents of my welcome packs, the first recipe cards and found a good place to advertise. So I figured, I had it made…….it was about the time Jamie Oliver started on his School Dinners campaign so kids and food were being propelled into the media spotlight.

The ads went out and I waited eagerly in anticipation for the first phone calls and orders. And the phone calls came - 20 os so queries in the first week which wasn’t bad as I’d advertised locally. But it wasn’t what the parents wanted.

Call after call came requests for somewhere to send the children to learn to cook. Excuses for not wanting to help them learn at home were varied - “…not enough time”; “can’t cope with the mess….”; “I just want someone else to teach them…”. And therein was my biggest stumbling block. Parents simply didn’t want to spend one afternoon a month helping their child to learn to cook - a pretty essentil life skill.

On the next round of enquiries, I made a point of saying that the recipes were for the whole family - Baked Cod with Three Cheeses, for example. This wasn’t a course teaching kids to make Krispie Cakes, it was about seasonal wholesome food. And people gradually started to enroll their children on our postal cooking course.

Wow, my first step into the world of blogging! One I’ve considered for a long time but just haven’t found the time to do.

A little bit about myself first. My name’s Dani and I’m a 33 year old mother of two girls. The eldest is 13 in April and the youngest will be 4. My husband is a surgeon, months away from finishing his training job and ready to apply to be a consultant.

I work part time as a Matron in main theatres at our local hospital. Although I enjoy the varied aspects of that work (and it was that work that allowed me to meet my husband!) my true passion is children’s cooking. So for the rest of my life, I run my children’s cooking website, www.cottagecooks.co.uk.

Cottage Cooks was started in June 2004, when my eldest daughter was 10 years old. I’ve always been an avid cook and she takes after me in that respect - not only did she like making cakes but she could knock out a better roast dinner at 10 years old than her father could!! I tried to find a suitable cooking course for her to attend - I wanted her to learn different dishes and extend her skills beyond what I felt I could teach her.  But it had to fit in with her other commitments and above all, it had to be fairly close by.

And that was the sticking point……living in rural Devon, there just weren’t any kids cooking schools close by. I spent a couple of months bemoaning this fact to my husband who blithely suggested that I set up my own cooking course. I knew exactly what I wanted and as an “ordinary mum”, I felt that there would surely be lots of other mums out there looking for the same thing.

So Cottage Cooks was born.