Hey my dudes!
Welcome back to another installment of everyone’s favorite series Bageriet Lördag: Behind the Business. Today I will be discussing my social media journey and what has worked for me. As always every person and business is different. This is more just a peak behind the curtain as opposed to a treatise on what you should or shouldn’t do. If you don’t care about that and just want the recipe it’s at the bottom of the page!
A frequent question asked in my comment sections is “how do you market your boxes?” And this answer is simple: social media! My followers buy my boxes. Most of my current following is because of Bageriet Lördag but I had actually been posting consistently on social media for years before that.
For those who are new here Bageriet Lördag is my one-day-a-week pop-up bakery that I run from my apartment. You can find info about here:
I burnt out while working in a restaurant in fall of 2019. I was on sick leave for months but by fall of 2020 I was back to work, this time at a bakery. I wasn’t even full time, just 75%, and yet I was struggling. I was exhausted all the time. This continued the whole time I worked at the bakery. Post-burn out my body just could not handle the long hours of physical labor baking requires. I needed to do something else. At the time my father was growing his youtube channel and said to me (and this is a real direct quote lol) “Cecilia, if I, a crusty old man, can build a following, then you, a pretty young girl, certainly can.” I thought that sounded pretty good; work from home, sit down whenever I want, bake whatever I want, a good deal!
I launched my youtube channel in December of 2021 and tried my best to post a new video every week. To be totally honest the videos were pretty awful. A few of them are still up if you want to take a look, but they’re pretty bad. Everything was hard in the beginning, I was uncomfortable on camera, the lighting was terrible and after a career spent running around kitchens and being surrounded by people I found sitting down, alone, to edit the videos to be deathly boring. I was also extremely embarrassed every time I posted. I knew the videos were terrible but just couldn’t figure out how to make them better. I had a couple thousand instagram followers, mostly because for a hot minute there I was Sweden’s first three Michelin star pastry chef. But I was so embarrassed about the youtube videos I wasn’t even promoting them on instagram. I was so worried my former chefs would see the videos and judge and laugh at me. I had so much anxiety about every single video and it made filming and editing feel like climbing an emotional mountain.
In December of 2022, after a full year of posting youtube videos, I finally reached my first 1,000 subscribers. Around the same time I had started to experiment with tiktok and had my first 1 million view video at thanksgiving. I had been doing daily vlogs documenting prepping for my annual thanksgiving party and they had done really well. I went from about 3,000 tiktok followers to 40,000+ in like a month. It was the first time anything on social media had “worked” for me and it gave me enough hope to keep going.
In the beginning of 2023 I decided to no longer be embarrassed and just go for it. I started posting on instagram, tiktok and youtube as consistently as I could. I made a posting schedule, I joined a facebook group for creators, I was really trying my best. I had a couple more videos get 1M+ views on tiktok and every time one did my spirits would be buoyed. I would think to myself “Ok, I can do this! I just need to keep trying!”.
But by 2024, while I had gained some semblance of an audience across platforms, I wasn’t making much money and was really stressed about it. Through a very random series of events I ended up getting a job as an office manager and finally felt like I could breathe. At least I had a paycheck. I loved that job, it was so incredibly easy. I pretty much just sat at the front desk all day, making sure the coffee machine was full and sometimes ordering some office supplies. It was great! One of the best things about that job was that I had so much time to edit my videos. My boss absolutely did not care (or maybe he actually didn’t know? I’m still not sure) what I was doing on my computer as long as I sat at my desk, greeted people arriving at the office and kept everything organized.
I had so much time to edit I decided to really buckle down on posting. I challenged myself to post a short form video (an instagram reel, a youtube short, a tiktok) every single day for 10 weeks. It worked! I was gaining followers faster than ever! On one hand I was so happy! Finally I was gaining traction, but on the other hand I still wasn’t making much money from social media.
Tiktok is not monetized in Sweden and to monetize it I would’ve had to create a brand new account that was registered in the US and try to grow my following again. The money from youtube shorts is teeny tiny and instagram doesn’t pay at all. I would learn later that facebook (of all platforms) actually pays pretty well but I didn’t know that at the time. I was making a small amount from my long form youtube videos, but nothing I could live on. I had not started substack at that time.
I also had a problem. I was baking so much at home, always trying to find another recipe to make for my channels. I was making all this food for it to go nowhere. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I brought a LOT to the office and I ate a lot of it myself. But it was just so many cakes and cookies and treats, I felt like what is the point of this? Who am I doing this for?
I also felt like it was so hard to come up with new ideas for videos all the time. I had content pillars and those were really helpful but still, it was just a lot of singular videos about singular recipes and trying to keep coming up with new things was tiring.
One morning, on my walk to work in the beginning of 2025, a solution came to me. I would run a bakery from my apartment. I would sell pastry boxes! One menu, no changes or substitutions, you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit. I needed to make things easy for myself. I would only be “open” one day a week so I wouldn’t burn out again. And, the best part, I would vlog the whole thing. No longer would I have to think about what I was supposed to film or post that day. Just vlog, edit, post. Easy! I would bake after work, edit while at the office and box pick up would be the weekend when I was off anyway.
The best part of this plan is that the bakery and my social media make a circle. The bakery is the content and the content promotes the bakery. They work with each other, not against each other. Not to brag, but this is genuinely the most ingenious system I have ever set up and I am, like, really really proud of it.
So that’s how I promote the bakery! With social media! It’s been a system that has worked exceedingly well since I started it in April 2025. It’s been a long windy road and right now things are really good but before we move on to today’s recipe I would just like to point out one last thing.
I have never, ever, had a year where every platform is doing well.
For several years tiktok was my best platform, it was so easy to get high views and many subscribers, but during that time youtube and instagram were really slow. Then, last year, things slowed down on tiktok but it was fine because, for the first time, instagram was going bananas. Then this year my growth on both tiktok and instagram has been absolutely glacial but youtube and substack are just going up and up and up. There always seems to be at least one platform just suckin’ it and at least one platform that is doing the best it’s ever done. Such is the nature of both social media and life. Even in the best of times there will be some dark corner where things aren’t going so well.
Alright, enough preaching and life lessons from me! On to the recipe!
These peanut honey cookies are exactly what you want from an American style cookie. Soft and chewy in the middle, crispy edges, enough salt to balance the sweetness without the cookies being salty, melty chocolate and crunchy peanuts. They are addictively good!
Xoxo,
Cecilia
P.S. The chocolate chips I used were made of “blond” chocolate. Valrhona’s is called dulcey, Callebaut’s is called gold, I call it blond, some people call it by its full government name “ caramelized white chocolate”. It has a toasty caramel flavor and blends seamlessly into the peanut butter and honey. It adds a lot to the cookie texturally while not overpowering the other flavors. Milk or white chocolate would both be good substitutes as blond chocolate can be tricky to find in the average grocery store. I bought mine online from Callebaut.
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