Canberra's cakes in a jar: It's Practically Perfect Portions

Samantha White's cake business started out of curiosity. She wanted to know if she really could bake a cake in a jar.

"I read a blog - a couple of years ago now - about how they used to send fruitcake in jars [to] soldiers in the war," she says. "So I thought I'd give it a go - and sure enough you can."

She was afraid the glass jar would shatter - but it was fine. So White, who was on maternity leave after the birth of her second child, started making batches of little cakes in jars for her friends and family. "They all insisted I should start a business," she says.

That's how Practically Perfect Portions was born - little jam jar-sized cakes filled with layers of cream, caramel, nuts and chocolate, and topped with everything from Ferrero Rocher to Nutella. All tied up with a bow.

White's background was in marketing and advertising - she was working for federal public service when she started baking for fun. She eventually turned the cakes in a jar into a business that evolved gradually over social media and through word of mouth. Now she says she's registered her kitchen with ACT Health to allow her to cook commercially and in recent months she made 3500 jars of cake.

She doesn't bake every cake individually in the jar these days. "I crumble in a bit of cake, then a bit of chocolate, or icing or caramel or cream, then a bit more of the rest," she says. "One of my customers called the Nutella cheesecake 'Sex in a Jar' and when I told another customer that she said 'Oh, I'd prefer to have the cake'."

The jars of cake are most in demand for birthday parties - particularly 30th birthdays. "My demographic is pretty much the 18 to 44-year-old female, based on the people who come to see me and Facebook," she says. "I also get a good number of orders for weddings, for bonbonnerie type things."

Chocolate is the biggest hit for her customers, with Nutella and Ferrero Rocher cakes among the most popular. "Nutella cheesecake is a big hit at the moment but also white chocolate and raspberry." And salted caramel is turning into a cult classic ("I still have people every week asking 'When are you doing it again? I must have it'.")

Amidst growing the business, White's also raising three kids under the age of six - Charlize, Imogen and baby Elijah - and had to take a couple of months off when she was pregnant with little Elijah to care for her daughter Imogen, who had major surgery to correct hip dysplasia. "She was in a full body cast. I was heavily pregnant trying to carry her around," she says. "So I focused on them for a good couple of months before I came back into the cakes. It's been a busy few years."

But husband John steps in to look after the kids when she's baking, taking over in the afternoons so she can fill the little jars with cake and prepare for a big pickup order. People collect their cakes from her south side home, or from a little network of clients who are happy to act as collection points in Woden, Queanbeyan and Palmerston. She's also on the markets and school fetes circuit. And she's done giant cakes too - a big 650ml jar full of banoffee pie ordered as a birthday present for a man who loved the English dessert. "It took him [and his wife] two nights to eat it."

White says she grew into baking, rather than it being an all consuming lifelong hobby or passion. "I've always liked being creative and I never found that one thing that I was super good at and this kind of evolved and became something I loved and other people loved. I'm really blessed that it's kind of worked out this way."