On Danielle Edgington’s quiet suburban road in Kings Heath, Birmingham, a queue snakes out from a small wooden shed. Inside, the shelves are stacked with cookies, brownies, lemon drizzle and old-school sprinkle cakes – all baked by Danielle, who quit her job as a catering manager eight months after opening the shed. It now brings in between £500 and £1,000 a week, with customers driving from as far as Redditch and Solihull. “To see a queue out there is just unbelievable,” she says. “It’s quite humbling really to see.”
Danielle, 41, had been a chef for 20 years. She launched a business during the pandemic delivering afternoon teas and birthday cakes, then started selling at markets. The shed was meant to sell spares, but demand exploded. “It’s taken over my life,” she says. “I’d get up, I’d go to work in the morning and then I’d come home. I’d be baking all evening. So it just became too much.” Now the shed is open seven days a week, from 9am to 9pm, and she credits much of the interest to her TikTok account. “I’ll get messages off customers saying, ‘what have you got in the shed today? Because we are travelling from a bit further out’.”
“Cake sheds like Danielle Edgington's in Birmingham earn up to £1,000 a week, but councils may enforce tighter licensing.”
Danielle’s story is part of a wider boom. Cake sheds – small, cupboard-like structures packed with home-baked goods sold on an honesty-box system – are becoming a Great British tradition, spreading from the countryside to the urban environment. “They are definitely becoming a feature in our landscape,” says Bronya Seifert of Daisy Cake Company. “It’s wonderful.” One online community is gaining up to 400 new members on Facebook a week. “Over the past few months the group has grown exponentially,” says Susanne Niess of That’s Cake by Susanne.
But the sweet trend could be under threat. Some councils are considering enforcing tighter licensing rules on the sheds. Dedicated cake shedders say if that happens, they could be forced to close. For Danielle, who now works full-time from her garden shed, the prospect is unnerving. “I’ve just not been able to keep up with the demand so I’ve decided to go full-time,” she says. “It’s a lot of cake.” Mother-of-two Charley Coleman-Pollard opened her own cake shed a year ago – but the dream, for now, hangs in the balance.