41 posts from 2007

Early November, my sister flew me out to Florida to bake cakes for two different parties (note to anyone flying with cake decorating equipment--they will open up your toolkit EVERY SINGLE TIME, and if you're lucky, they won't accidently open up a bottle of dark green gel and let it leak all over the rest of your colors.  Next time it'll go as carry-one luggage).  

MacDaddy and I have been passing around the same cold about three times apiece now.  I'm freakin' tired of being sick all the time.  We also went out to Florida for a friend's wedding, and then two weeks later I returned for a cake project.  That's why I've been so lax, and that's the excuse I'm sticking to.  Too bad...

I learned how to make corn tortillas with the huge tortilla machine at work last night, and I have two words for you:  flaming tortillas.

On my way in to work this afternoon, a sign for a restaurant said "Ditch your girlfriend."  By the end of my shift it was back to its normal advertising.  Not sure if it was a personal message or just someone messing with the sign, but I kinda wonder what the story was....

In 1935, Modern Mechanix had a brief article about the wonders of whipped cream from a canister.  Of course this canister is attached to a shitload of equipment.  With all the talk of a bright future, homes in space, robots, and food in pill form--it's amazing that canned whipped cream was one of the things we actually got right.

Cream Whipped By Expanding Gas

AT THE push of a button, ordinary cream, subjected to a new process, can now be turned into whipping cream. The cream is first put up by the dairy in containers of automobile steel. Rendered air-tight by the elimination of oxygen, the container next receives an injection of nitrous oxide gas. As the housewife presses the button on the top of the small cask, the nitrous oxide expands, forcing out the cream under pressure and, through aeration, whips the product.

The article about a New Kitchen Built to fit your Wife is interesting too.  Many features can be found today, with the exception of the coolest (and pretty damn important to me) item--counters that can be raised or lowered to fit height and arm length.  Yep, I'm a tall snarkychef.

Joel Johnson of Boing Boing Gadgets is giving me a chance to keep up with this weeks robot theme:  Introducing CrustaStun, a restaurant-grade crustacean electrocuter.

"I have immense respect for phylum arthropoda, but they're nature's robots. In her wisdom, she made the mechanized terrors full of sweet, delicate meat."

That's nice, but $2,000 to electrocute large pinchy waterbugs?  I'll stick to a sharp knife to the tiny brain.  Hell, even a mallet will work in a pinch.

I'm not suggesting that you go elsewhere for a cake (well, I would advise it, but that's not the point of this post), but there are things you should know before you order a cake from a grocery store bakery.

Point One:  A grocery store is about quantity.  Quality takes a distant second place.  I know that my bosses would have a fit right now if they read this, but while they want the customer to be satisfied, they also want us to work fast and keep labor down.  I've heard "that's good enough" too many times to think otherwise.  How much time should be spent on a cake?  Between 7 and 15 minutes, and that 15 minute cake better be a complicated one.  So what does that translate to?  The corners and edges will not be sharp and clean, you may see cake crumbs in the frosting, the color may not match the image, some minor decorations/flowers will be left off, the borders may not be the same, the icing techniques may not be the same (yes, this will make a difference in the way it looks), and there will be no sprinkles individually placed on each shell of the border.... think more of a dump and run.  While kids usually don't care about any of this--if you're trying to impress obnoxious parents or neighbors, you may want to go to a specialty bakery instead.

Point Two:  The original cake design that you have selected may not have space to write "Happy Birthday So-and-so", that means we'll have to shift something to make room.  The "Cars" cake below is a perfect example of this.  Please don't complain because we moved the car to the back of the cake. Yes, people will complain about this.

Point Three:  The colors may not be exact matches because not all bakeries have all the same colors.  If you need to match the cake with fabric, please bring it in before ordering the cake and ask if it is possible.  You'd think this wouldn't be an issue with regular birthday cakes, but I have had a customer pissed off and demanding to see a manager because the sky was not the same shade of blue as the image (also, there was too much sky, but that's the next point).

Point Four:  Not all cake decorators are trained artists.  For cake designs that require drawing skill, there will be variations; hell, there will be variations anyway.  Instructions don't come with most of the decorations, so we're putting it together the best way we can.  The cake below was the design with the complaint about the color of the sky and the amount of sky vs. the mountains.  Part of that was also because of the increase in cake size, which throws off some of the proportions... and that is our next point.

Point Five:  Most of the cake designs are based on quarter-sheet cake sizes.  That means if you increase the cake size to a half-sheet or full-sheet, we can increase the size of the painting and decorating, but the deco packs, or kit sizes will stay the same.  For the cake above, that means the fence will only go across a tiny fraction of the cake, instead of almost half.  There is no magic tool that will allow us to increase the size of our toys (at this point I will refrain from making the obvious obscene smart-ass comment).  So if you order a full-sized sheet cake and one small little deco pack, don't complain because the cake looks empty.

Point Six:  Do not put off ordering your cake until the last minute.  Our bakery has a 24 hour rule.  While we don't always enforce that rule during the week, we are very strict about it on the weekends.  On a weekday, we may have anywhere from 5 to 12 special orders.  That's not a lot compared to the weekend.  On a Saturday, you can expect 40 to 60 cake orders, and most of them are due by noon (every once in a while we'll have up to 75 orders).  So if you show up on Friday night demanding a cake to be ready by 8 a.m., it's not going to happen.  We'll just tell you "no" as nice as we can and them make fun of you after you leave.  If you decide to go to the store manager and convince them to force the order on us, you'll get the shittiest cake possible on Saturday.  And when you complain--again--the bakery manager will point out to the store manager that it was the best we could do with such short notice without screwing up the orders for the rest of the customers who actually ordered on time.

Point Seven:  The best way to get a nice looking cake out of a grocery store bakery is to order it during the week.  You can freeze it for a few days and it will be just fine (contrary to popular belief, freezing cakes will not make it taste nasty unless you already have funky-smelling food in your freezer or if you freeze it for a long period of time).  The large amount of orders on the weekend means we'll be spending as little time on each cake as possible in order to get them all out out on time.  In all honesty, we get into more trouble for having a cake out late than we do for sending out a shitty-looking cake.  So guess which one we're shooting for...

Point Eight:  Many grocery store bakeries will not do freehand drawings on cakes.  Too many times what you see in your head does not translate well to a cake, and we don't like being punished for it.  It's also because we can't spend a lot of time on one specific cake without increasing the cost.  Yes, our cakes may be inexpensive, but the short time we spend on each cake is one of the reasons WHY we're cheaper than real bakeries.

Point Nine: While our store will decorate a cake with a scanned copy of a photo--please do not ask us to break the law by demanding that we scan an image that is copyrighted.  That's not fair to us, and nobody wants to be responsible for the store receiving up to a $10,000 fine.  Snapshots are fine, images that your kid drew (even of originally copyrighted images) are also fine, but ripping out a picture from a magazine or printing a photo from "The High School Musical" off of your computer is going to get us in trouble.  This also applies to the NFL, NBA, and many college logos (although our store does have permission to use UT and A&M logos).  If we have a cake that has a copyrighted edible image on it, it is because we've already paid the fee for that specific use of that specific image.  And please don't argue about it saying that nobody's going to pay attention to a bakery breaking copyright law; because thanks to the current copyright frenzy, it's happening now.

Point Ten: Grocery store bakeries are not nut-free.  There are too many chances for cross contamination between breads with nut toppings, muffins with nut toppings, nuts from certain cakes, and peanut butter cookies.  If you or your child has a serious nut allergy--don't order a cake a store.  While the chances of contamination are slim, they are still there.

We want you to have a positive experience at our bakery.  We don't deliberately go out of our way to make a crappy looking cake, and we try to be pleasant and helpful.  But we ask the same of you.  Letting us know that there is something wrong with the cake or service is not an issue--just don't be rude or demanding in the process.  We don't mind fixing cakes and I will, and have in the past, personally gone out of my way to help customers who are polite with their problems.  Happy customers are returning customers, returning customers make happy managers, and happy managers make my job a hell of a lot easier.

Final Note:  I've mentioned differences between grocery store bakery cakes and specialty bakery cakes.  So I thought I'd give you some examples of the price differences and why they are different.

Grocery Store Bakery:  In our store, a quarter-sheet cake with a deco kit is $19.99.  The cake is frozen and shipped from the main bakery in a different city (this is standard for most grocery store bakeries) to our store where we decorate it the morning of the order.  The frosting is shipped in buckets (with the exception of the whipped frosting, that is made on demand).  As mentioned above, we don't get to spend a lot of time making sure that every little thing on the cake is perfect.  There are some bakeries, and I'm not going to mention which ones because one of them is extremely sue-happy, that has their cakes shipped in already decorated.

Specialty Bakery:  One bakery from Austin charges $45 for the exact cake as above.  The cake is from scratch, although they use the same frosting as the grocery store bakery.  Their decorators have a little bit more time to get the decorations right.

Someone who bakes on the side: The prices for the same cake is somewhere between the other two bakeries.   The cakes AND the frosting are from scratch, and the decorator has more time to make the cake look right; but the kitchen is not a commercial kitchen that has to be checked out by the Health Department.  Ask about it if you aren't sure (when I do cakes on the side, I make sure everyone knows that I currently work from a home kitchen, but that also means I can't sell my cakes to some groups or in certain situations).  The upside to people who bake from home is that many of us will do cake designs that other bakeries won't (heh heh heh), and some of us will de-nut our kitchens for people with food allergies.

One of the unexpected side effects of working in a bakery that averages 40-60 special order cakes on a Saturday is colored boogers.  No one warned me about this, so the first time I blew my nose after a busy Saturday I kinda freaked out for a brief moment when bright blue snot seeped through my kleenex.  Yes, bright neon blue nose mucus.  Now there are probably a few people wondering how I got colored gel meant for icing up my nose, but there is a very simple explanation for that--airbrushing.  Yes, cake decorators use an airbrush on most of the highly colored cakes because frosting that is saturated with color tends to taste a little funky... and I'm talking more funky than store-bought frosting should taste.  So we spray the outside of the frosting, leaving the rest of it white.  Of course the decorative elements are still made with colored frosting: such as the writing, roses, and other such things.  This cake is the reason that last Saturday was a purple booger day for me.  I had three of these to spray and there was a lot of violet and neon purple in the air.  Sometimes I wonder if all of this paint--food-based as it may be--is gonna mess up my lungs in the future.  I mean, look at all the microwaved popcorn butter breathers in the news.

Maybe I'll bring in and wear a face mask one weekend to see if I can freak out my coworkers and customers.

I'm at home sick, lying on the couch, fighting off a needy cat who wants to smother me with her love (literally), and for some strange reason all I can think about is that I should be updating my blog.  Why don't I ever have this urge when there's actually something to blog about?

Oh, if you haven't noticed--I'm in a robot mood... not sure if it's a homicidal robot bent on destroying humanity and taking over the world, or just a cute little cartoon robot.  Only time will tell.

You can have Britney Spears, Avril Lavigne, Jessica Simpson and all the other younger singers because Annie Lennox makes them all look like 2-dimensional paper dolls.

This month Annie released "Dark Road," the first single from her new album "Songs of Mass Destruction", which will be released on October 1, 2007.  Check it out below:

Like most kids in the 80's, I was an Eurythmics fan (I mean it was almost impossible not to be), but it wasn't until the early 90's that I really discovered Annie Lennox.  Her vocal ability is amazing, and since she's also the songwriter, it gives her music extra depth... kinda like adding a little wine to a sauce.  The sauce is fine, but the wine gives it a bit more oomph.  Yeah, I know that analogy was a somewhat stupid.  Let me put it this way:  Listening to Annie Lennox gives me ideas for designing stained glass windows (seriously), but I don't know how to make stained glass windows, so I just listen to her music and dream about what I could do if I knew how to do it.  The good news is that I know how to decorate cakes, and I think that I may be able to translate my vision to icing.  That would be an interesting entry for the 2008 cake competition.  Sugarcraft Entry: Annie Lennox, in Darkness and in Light.

(Why stained glass?  Because Annie Lennox's voice is so rich that can only be compared to a stained glass window when the sun shines through it making it glow with color.  The only other vocal artist whose voice I can compare to a physical element is Alison Krauss--when she sings, she sounds like melted butter and honey.)