We set up in my parents’ garage and my brother used his very small savings to buy an industrial oven. We started with novelty birthday cakes, then added other fun items like cake pops. Our whole catalogue was online. No shop front except for the occasional stall at the local mall, which wasn’t nearly as normal as it is now for small artisans.

Then stylised events really started taking off with the internet spawning food and party bloggers, so demand grew. It was all very exciting but it took a while for me to eventually take the big leap and leave my stable job where I was beginning to establish myself.

Coming from a big tight-knit Filipino family and community really helped us grow our business in the beginning. We would get a lot of help from our aunts, uncles and cousins, from rolling cake pops or delivering cakes to selling at markets for us. They spread the word about our business to their friends and colleagues, and will still recommend us whenever they get the chance.

Our business was built on the support of our family and community who wanted to see us succeed.

The experience has really helped me understand what being Filipino means to me: valuing my culture, traditions, and my family, and bound up with this is knowing how to work hard and overcome adversity.

When we started out, it was not always easy being Filipino in spaces we were working in.

The creative scene and food and hospitality scene was very white.

We felt the pressure to always add a white person to anything we were doing publicly, like a stall or expo. We were worried that a brown Asian team from the western suburbs was not ‘mainstream’ enough.

And a lot of our customer base was in the more affluent white neighbourhoods. It was initially intimidating for me to have to work with them as I was anxious if my work was good enough for their tastes.

You find many Filipinos in the hospitality industry, working behind the scenes in restaurants, hotels and events, but their essential work is rarely celebrated by the industry. Even more, we’re hardly recognised as being business leaders or creatives. My brother, to this day, is still regularly mistaken as being ‘just the delivery driver’.

When I started experimenting with ‘cake art’ a few years ago, we amassed a large Instagram following and it led to a few features in magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. We opened a cake studio, which started popping up on a few Sydney ‘it lists’.

It was at this point that we felt brave enough to introduce Filipino flavours into our menu like ube, leche flan and pandan.

Today, these flavours are everywhere on Australian TV food shows and inside trendy bakeries. And now we talk about calamansi as maybe being ‘the next big thing’.

It shows that the scene has changed so much from when I began my journey.

The creative face of Australia is changing. It’s not so white anymore. It’s a little more brown.

I hope there will be more Filipinos venturing into the creative sector and food industry in the future so we can show how talented we are and how good our food is. And I hope that those of us established in the industry will help push them forward.