An inspector calls

One of the essential things I have to do to be able to sell my cupcakes to the wide world is be inspected by the local council. I contacted their offices on Wednesday and by Friday morning, I was frantically scrubbing my kitchen, like the loopy love child of Lady Macbeth and Mr Muscle.

I got up super early and after waving off Handsome husband and Darling boy, I got to work before I had to log on to my laptop to work from home. There wasn’t an inch of the kitchen and utility room that wasn’t tidied and cleaned in anticipation of the inspection. Not that my kitchen isn’t normally fairly clean (well, as clean as a kitchen with a toddler, husband and 3 cats can be) but I thought I should make an extra special effort.

The food inspector arrived and to my surprise didn’t seem to want to know how nicely organised my larder was (sugar on the right organised by the finest of grain, to flour on the left- organised from bread-making via gluten free) He didn’t ask to look inside my fridge either, where he would have found it to be a shining example that my Home Economics teacher, Mrs Stobbs, would have been proud of. We each had to fill out a form, which we, naturally did over a vanilla cupcake each. Mr Inspector did have a look at my eggs, and he explained egg labelling to me (‘1’ means free range apparently)

I passed with flying colours (I think mostly because cupcakes are such low risk really, rather then my domestic devotion, though he did glance around and say my kitchen was ‘clean and tidy’) and he was such a nice bloke we had a very friendly chat about the chickens Mr Inspector keeps on his allotment. I also offered him a vanilla cupcake- with sprinkles- not normally my thing- the sprinkles that it. But it seemed to appeal to the Inspector. We ate them accompanied by a cup of tea and chicken chat.

So, that’s it. 15 minutes later and I have a certificate that says the council know who I am, where I am and what I will be doing.

Next up is public liability insurance which I need in case someone trips over my stall, or if a cupcake leaps off the stall and fly through the air to hit a member of the public squarely in the eye, causing them to trip over a small dog, which causes the small dog to bite the ankles of an old lady, which causes her to shout, which wakes a baby, which makes the man selling salami to jump and cut his finger off with the cleaver he was using, spurting blood into an open plug socket , which short circuits and causes an explosion that is seen for miles around. You never know.