MAKING ORDINARY REMARKABLE.

All Things Decadent started with a fairly persistent thought: this could be better. 

Familiar food, made with an unreasonable amount of attention until it becomes something worth remembering.

WHY WE’RE LIKE THIS

At 4:17 in the morning, Sanita decided the problem was the frangipane....

This was not, objectively speaking, an emergency. Nobody had complained about the frangipane. Nobody was waiting outside demanding an explanation. There was no national shortage, no pastry-related incident requiring immediate intervention. It simply wasn't quite right.

And not quite right is a surprisingly effective way of ensuring Sanita doesn't sleep.

The problem wasn't that it was bad. Bad would have been easy. You fix bad. The problem was that it was perfectly acceptable, and perfectly acceptable has always irritated her.

There is a thought that has followed Sanita through most of her life: this could be better. Not bigger for the sake of being bigger. Not more expensive. Not more complicated. Just better.

She trained as a pastry chef in Latvia and worked in a pâtisserie before coming to Britain in 1995. Then, in what may have been a slight overreaction to the problem of recipe costing, she became a chartered accountant. And because apparently that wasn't quite enough, she eventually acquired an MSc in Finance too.

There were other things in between. Technology, finance, companies, spreadsheets, boardrooms, budgets and a long and perfectly respectable corporate career. But pastry wasn't something she discovered after all of that. It was where she started. And, eventually, where she came back to - now professionally qualified to make the pastry and unnecessarily well qualified to calculate exactly how much butter she put in it.

And when she came back, the same problem was waiting for her: perfectly acceptable food.

Because food has never been particularly interesting to Sanita simply because people need to eat. The interesting food is the stuff that makes somebody stop halfway through a conversation. The thing passed across a table with “you need to try this.” The pastry somebody comes back looking for the following Saturday because they've been thinking about it all week. 

The jar bought to go with cheese and subsequently attacked with a spoon.

So she started making things. Pastries, cookies, macarons, preserves, cheesecakes. Some worked immediately. Some emphatically did not. And some were made again and again because there was something particularly irritating about them: they were good, but they weren't yet what they could be.

That is how All Things Decadent grew. Not from a grand plan to reinvent British food, but from a refusal to leave perfectly good things alone.

A cinnamon pastry is familiar, so make the dough ridiculously soft. Give it enough filling. Shape it beautifully. Make the edges caramelise and the middle the bit people fight over. A cookie is familiar, so make one that requires a little commitment and contains something worth discovering in the middle. Marmalade is familiar, so burn the oranges. Cheesecake is familiar, so make one good enough that somebody who bought a slice yesterday comes looking for it again today.

There is no great culinary trick behind any of this. There is simply an unreasonable amount of attention paid to things most sensible people would have considered finished several attempts earlier.

And perhaps that's the point.

We don't believe remarkable food has to be unfamiliar. Quite the opposite. Some of the best things in the world are things you already know: a pastry on a Saturday morning, a jar opened at the kitchen table, a box of cookies carried into somebody's house, something bought as a gift and then very nearly not given away.

The pleasure comes from expecting something familiar and discovering that somebody cared rather more than was strictly necessary.

That's what we're trying to make: food worth stopping for, food worth talking about and food worth coming back for. And, one day, a British food company known for taking ordinary things and asking the question that started all of this:

What would make this remarkable?

For now, All Things Decadent is still small. Things are made in small batches. Recipes are still changed because Sanita decided at an unreasonable hour that something could be softer, sharper, darker, lighter, crunchier or simply better.

There are probably more sensible ways to build a food business.

But sensible was never really the ambition.

The frangipane needed work. And she wasn't finished.

Making ordinary remarkable.