Cake Talk

Halloween nightmare at the bakery

I woke up at 5 a.m. screaming "No! No!"

My dogs were scared and licking my face (it was probably the sweat, I wasn't really screaming was I?)

In my dream, one of my employees was spraying a cookie with an entire can of gold luster spray because a customer had asked for a "shiny cookie".  Why was that scary?  Because the cookie in question sells for $1.45 and the can of luster spray costs $19.

Sidebar: That's Pat the angel, Kristi the devil, Emily the cat and Halloween organizer extraordinaire, me as Queen Bee, and Ben the mouse.

I know you are probably thinking "this woman has serious issues" but it has been a long month.  Between the new cookbook and the Nick Saban Straw Hat cookies, we've been on TV twice, in the newspaper once, and had our picture taken (not this one...) for a story in Tuscaloosa Magazine. Today is Halloween, tomorrow is Homecoming at the University of Alabama, and we've made and sold over 100 dozen cookies this week alone. We've done cakes for ten weddings this month, decorated dozens of birthday cakes, and survived the crowds for the Kentuck Festival.  I should be sleeping well...  And I will.  Tomorrow.

Opening a bakery: Other people's money

 Lesson #3:  You are not playing with Other People's Money.

A few months ago, my 4-year-old niece looked up at me and asked "Aunt Mary, what do you do with all the money you get from the bakery?"  My answer?  "Well darling, I give most of it away."

She plays bakery with her sisters.  It's partly my fault.  I went to visit a while back and brought the three sisters pint sized aprons and chef hats.  They already had a little cash register and they set up an elaborate bakery, with lots of pretend pastries. When their mom and I lined up to "buy" them however, they wanted real money.

As a kid, you learn to play with other people's money (OPM), specifically mom's and dad's (or Aunt Mary's).  Even when you grow up and get a job, you still play with OPM.  When I first started working in an office, I used to love requisitioning supplies and stuff.  It was like going shopping, but you didn't need money.  You filled out a form, got it approved and presto!  Paper clips, note pads, pens, whatever.

I graduated from pens and paper clips to business cards, then to plane tickets and hotel rooms.  All reimbursed for or paid directly with OPM.

Then I opened a bakery.  OPM became MY MONEY. Money I would otherwise be using to pay the  mortgage, buy new shoes, pay the power bill, or save for retirement.  Now I use my money to pay employees and buy stuff for the bakery.  You might think it is the bakery's money, but it is really my money.

And when you spend your own money, you do things differently.  To put this in perspective, let me share a few equivalents:

1. Burning a tray of cookies is dinner for two at a casual restaurant, WITH a glass of wine.
2. Throwing out one underbaked cake is a tank of gas for a mid-size car, when gas is $4 per gallon.
3. Letting a single tray of pastries go stale is a decent pair of shoes.
4. Overfilling an entire batch of 20 pumpkin breads so that they run all over the oven and become unsellable is a really nice pair of designer shoes.
5. Letting the day's batch of bread over-proof is the power bill AND the phone bill.

And the bonus round?  A dysfunctional or inefficient employee working one day per week for a month is the mortgage.

So what do I do differently?

1. I send people home when they are inefficient (or tired or hung over). 
2. I keep an extra eye on the proofer and oven.  Having a good nose is also helpful.  Mine detects that burnt smell pretty early on.
3. I find ways to recycle items we cannot sell.  Bread gets a second life as toast.  Undercooked cake becomes crumbs, ugly pumpkin bread becomes truffles.  Day-old cinnamon rolls become bread pudding.

The lesson learned: Be aware of what is going on in your bakery.  Some things cannot be avoided, but all those little mishaps add up and will make the difference between success and failure.  Know what you can control and what you cannot.

One thing that will never change -- while to me, it's my money, to everyone else it's OPM.

Opening a bakery: It's OK to run out of some things

Lesson #2: Learn when it's OK to run out of something.  I try to train my employees to let me know when we are almost out of something so I can have enough inventory to keep the bakery running smoothly.  I am not doing a very good job at this.  We have a list on the refrigerator.  It is peppered with items that we may seem low on but use infrequently.  And it is totally lacking the obvious items like flour, eggs, margarine and oil that we are almost completely out of but use every day.

Why is this important?  Well, I remember taking accounting courses in business school. Assets include cash and inventory. Liabilities include wages, taxes and accounts payable.  On paper, the assets always equal the liabilities.  The problem is you cannot pay liabilities with inventory.  Most suppliers and debtors want cash.  The trick is to have enough cash on hand to pay your bills, while at the same time have enough inventory to run the bakery.  As the saying goes, "Cash is king."

Add to this equation the simple fact that you buy large quantities of flour and sugar and eggs and boxes at a time, but sell the finished products a only a few at a time.

Now back to the list. The list is extremely important for things we use every day.  We don't want to run out of flour or sugar or eggs.  When we do, production comes to a halt and I either send people home, or off the the Piggly Wiggly or Sam's Club (both are inefficient ways to acquire inventory). Personally I think they like going to the Piggly Wiggly...  Production came to a halt and we had to go to the Pig today.  For molasses (essential for Denny Chimes Gingerbread Cookies and it's homecoming week at the University of Alabama).

The list is also important for critical items, even if they are only consumed in small quantities. We don't use a lot of yeast at one time, but we cannot make bread without it.  I need to know when we are running out.  We may not use red food coloring in large quantities, but we cannot make red velvet cake, or decorate Alabama-themed shortbread cookies unless we have some on hand.  During football season this is extremely important.  We use boxes one at a time, but we cannot sell a cake or a dozen cookies without a box.  And then the molasses...

On the other hand, here are 10 items currently on our refrigerator list that we CAN afford to run out of:

1. Comet - We use comet to clean the sinks at the end of the day.  The sinks can be cleaned with regular dish soap and bleach in a pinch.  We do not use enough cleanser to have it delivered in large quantities from a supplier so I buy comet at Sam's Club (when they happen to have it in stock - which is another story altogether).   I would never make a special trip or send someone to the store just to buy cleanser.
2. Pepperoni - We make pizza on Wednesday.  Usually we'll make tomato pizzas, pizzas topped with pesto, and pizzas topped with pepperoni.  However, since pizza is not a regular menu item, offering only cheese and pesto pizzas does not signify the end of the world at Mary's, nor does it warrant a special trip to the store.
3. Dried cranberries - We use a variety of dried fruit to make our fresh scones.  About three times a year I buy several varieties of bulk dry fruit. Inevitably we'll run out of one before the others.  This means that for the next few weeks, we'll be offering only blueberry or cherry scones.  No big deal.
4. Apricot glaze - I buy apricot glaze as a convenience.  We use it in reasonably small quantities for our morning pastries and we could make it from scratch, but having it ready-made saves time in the morning.  We buy a case at a time, which means six #10 cans, or enough to last 4-6 months.  It is on the list because we've just opened a can, and only one is left on the shelf.  That's at least a months worth.  Again, no big deal.
5. Green food coloring - Remember your color wheel?  We have large amounts of two shades of blue and two shades of yellow.  Green is not critical.
6. Orange food coloring - Ditto.  We are not in Auburn (school colors = orange and blue) and Halloween is the day after tomorrow.  On Saturday, the need for orange food coloring will be even less critical than it is today.  Orange can wait.
7. Plastic soup spoons - We have almost 5000 regular plastic spoons.  The soup spoons can wait a week or two or three...
8. Cupcake box inserts - We buy special inserts to place in boxes that hold cupcakes.  Each insert holds 30 cupcakes in place so they do not shift in the box.  We use them at the approximate rate of 2-3 per week.  They come 50 to a case and we just hit the halfway mark.  I'm thinking December.
9. Doilies - They come 1000 to a box and we have about one-fourth of a box.  That's 250.  We use about 10 per day to line trays for the display cases. That's about 25 days worth, or four to five weeks.
10. Straws - We use straws as architectural supports for stacked cakes.  We also give away straws with iced coffee. Once in a blue moon a customer will ask for a cup with ice (and straw) to go with a canned or bottled drink.  We buy them 5000 at a time, five boxes of 1000.  We have two boxes on hand.

Today's lesson?  Timing of your purchases is extremely important for controlling cash flow.  Know what's critical and what's not.  Know your supply chain and how long it takes to get something delivered.  Manage accordingly.

Next lesson?  You are not playing with other people's money anymore.

Pumpkin Ginger Truffles: Awsome mistake!

What do you do with 20 loaves of ugly but delicious pumpkin bread?  The batter looked so perfect,nice and fluffy.  And it went nicely into the pans.  Problem is, I put too much in the pans.  So much in fact that the batter runneth over.  All over.  What a mess!  So I did something a baker never does.  I took the pans, half baked, out of the oven, and placed them on sheet pans to protect our new oven from the still spilling and now burning batter flowing out of the pans (even though it was much too late for that...)

Of course, those pumpkin breads did what any half baked cake does when you take it out of the oven and put it back.  They fell terribly.  Forget culinary school, even my mom told me never to open the oven while cakes were baking!

I tasted the ugly breads.  Wonderful.  Who could go wrong with butter, brown sugar, flour and fresh organic pumpkins!  Being a frugal bakery owner, I figured we should be able to save them somehow and I could not bear to trow them away.  So they were emptied into containers and placed in the freezer for future use.

It came to me last night.  Add white chocolate ganache to hold the cake together.  Maybe some candied ginger.  Then roll it in something crunchy.  That might be good.

And so we have pumpkin ginger truffles.  We added some dried crushed gingerbread cookies for texture and flavor.  Then ground more gingerbread cookies with toasted almonds and toasted coconut to roll the confections in.

Sure are delicious!  Te perfect fall cookie.  Just in time for Halloween.

So you want to open a bakery...

You're a great cook.  A great baker.  Everybody loves your bread, cookies, brownies, pastries, cakes, whatever.  Maybe you've been to culinary school.  Maybe you even work in a bakery.  Now you want to open your very own bakery...

I love owning a bakery, but it is not without its challenges.  And I wish someone had been there three years ago to steer me in the right direction.  Maybe if I had just listened... I might have avoided some of the pitfalls.

This is not a guide, and certainly not an organized lecture.  It's random thoughts and suggestions, in no particular order, on a variety of issues, many of which you will probably not find in a textbook.  Stay tuned, I'll post them as they come to me.

Today's random thought?  Inventory.  First, let me state the obvious.  Unsold baked goods, even those that do not need to be refrigerated, will eventually dry out or spoil, and will eventually need to be thrown out and replaced.  And the ones that won't spoil, like boxes and bags, tie up money you could be using on things you really need (like salaries and utilities), and they take up space.

Lesson #1: Don't bake more than you will reasonably sell in a day.  Pastries are really good when they are fresh.  Even better when they are still warm.  And while everyone knows that rows of pretty pastries look nice and attract customers, even the best of intentions are sometimes just plain wrong.

For example.  You want the breakfast case to look pretty, so you bake dozens of fresh pastries on Saturday morning, when you are going to be closed on Sunday.  The case looks lovely.  Everyone comments on how pretty it is, as they buy one or two or three pastries.  In fact, the case still looks lovely (and half-full) at 3:00 when you close.  Some pastries are perfectly good for a few days, but others are not.  They dry out and have to be dealt with.  You now have several choices, and they all cost money.

1. You can throw out those pastries that will be stale and dry (at best) by Monday.  Ouch, just look at the money going into the the trash.  On the plus side, you are not rewarding anyone for over-baking, which might encourage them to do it again.
2. You can give them away to employees or customers or the soup kitchen.  Claim "good will" if you like, but employees will continue the rewarded behavior (see # 1 above), and customers will start coming in at the end of the day, not to buy anything, but for the free pastries.  The soup kitchen will love you.
3. You can sell them at half-price on Monday.  We used to do this with bread.  Full price the day it was baked, and half price thereafter.  We sold very little fresh bread but LOTS AND LOTS  of day-old bread.  In fact, for months after we finally stopped making bread everyday, folks were coming in asking for the day-old bread.
4. You can give them out as samples.  If they are too old to sell, why would you give them as samples, to entice people to buy more?  You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Enough said.
5. You can recycle them.  This sometimes works.  We make very good bread pudding from our day-old cinnamon rolls.  And we routinely grind day-old cookies or croissants to make the crusts for cheesecake.  However, if you don't need them in a hurry, you will have to store them in the freezer, where they will continue to take up space.

What did we learn?  Know your products.  What keeps and what does not.  Pay attention to how much you are likely to sell on a particular day, and err on the side of running out, especially for items that are best fresh. Communicate this information to your employees and be sure they understand.  Never assume they have the same priorities as you.

Lesson #2: JIT ("Just in Time") -- When to buy more of something and when to wait until you are completely out.  Watch for this one next...

Wrong wedding cake?

One of my favorite blogs is Cake Wrecks, whose subtitle is "When professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong."  My favorite part is when they show you a photo of how the cake was "supposed" to look, then a photo of the actual cake (wreck).  So let me tell you about this wedding cake.

It was ordered months ago by a bride who wanted a cake decorated like one on our website titled "Chocolate Swirls."   This is the photo from the website of how the cake was supposed to look.  The cake ordered was to be larger, with fresh flowers, but that was the only change noted on the signed contract.

The wedding was out of town, about 65 miles along a winding 2-lane road through the country, but Emily has GPS on her phone so were not really worried (she entered the address and voila! directions!).  The main concern for a road trip like this is if we need to repair the cake on-site.  What if we have to come to a sudden stop and the cake slides in the car.  Or someone puts a finger in it, or worse...  We always bring a bucket full of repair tools, like extra buttercream, piping bags, tips, toothpicks, skewers, spatulas, you-name-it.  Like the old saying goes, "it's better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it." And it is not like we can just drive back to the shop if we forget something.

The bride had been in the shop a few times in the weeks before the wedding, with various questions, and all the fluttering around the cake order made me even more cautious.  After making and base-coating the cake, we called the bride the day before the wedding to double check the design. Yes she said, it was the "chocolate swirl cake" on the website.

Even so, we brought the cake un-decorated -- three plain white iced squares.  Just in case something goes terribly wrong in the car, dark chocolate ganache decorations would be difficult to repair.  Better to leave extra time to decorate the cake on-site.  An hour and fifteen minutes later, we arrive at the bride's house.  The house and yard have been beautifully decorated for the wedding and there are lots of friends and family members buzzing about, getting ready for the big event.

One more time, "We're doing the chocolate swirls, right?"  "Yep" says the bride's mother, so we go to work stacking and decorating the cake.  When we are done, I find the mother again and ask about the flowers.  She finds them for us and comments on how beautiful the cake is, it almost doesn't need flowers.  We put a few Gerber daisies and sunflowers on the cake, double check one more time that everyone is happy, and take our leave for the long drive home.

So imagine my surprise when I get back to the shop on Monday morning and find the cake stands have already been returned. The morning manager, Miss Pat, had just opened the shop when the mother of the bride brought the cake stands back.  Best I can tell, the conversation went something like this.

Pat: "How was everything?"
MOB: "Beautiful.  Do you keep a record of cakes ordered."
Pat: "Sure, why?"
MOB: "Well, what does it say for our cake?"
Pat (looking for the contract): "Chocolate swirls" (at this point Pat brings the website up on the computer and shows the picture of the chocolate swirl cake to the MOB).
MOB: "Well, that's not the cake we ordered."

Pat had not decorated the cake, nor had she gone on the road trip, so she was unprepared and probably gave the MOB a blank look, which prompted the MOB to point to another photo of a cake on the website. This one.

MOB: "This is the cake we wanted.  The one you did was beautiful and all, but it was not the cake we ordered."

Other than being the same shape and size, the two cakes could not have been more different.  They are not even on the same page on the web site.  For the record, this one is called "Ivory Squares" and it has a monogram on the middle tier.

Miss Pat did the only thing she could have done in this situation.  She apologized profusely.  And she said she would tell me as soon as I came in.

I'm at a complete loss.  For the first time since I opened the shop two-and-a-half years ago, I have no idea how to respond to this lady. The general consensus among family and friends was that no response was necessary.  What could you possibly say?  That was two weeks ago.  If anyone has suggestions, I am all ears.

Ooh, that wonderful bakery smell...

The most common thing people say when they walk in the door to Mary's Cakes is "it smells so good in here." The most common response?  "Thanks," but I am always tempted to say "We're a bakery, what were you expecting?"

It's one thing to have really good cookies and pastries (which we certainly do), but it's usually the smells that people remember.  That wonderful bakery smell.  Sometimes it's the bread, sometimes cake, sometimes chocolate ...gingerbread ...apple tarts ...banana bread ...toasted almonds ...cinnamon rolls...  I could go on and on, and am not sure which I like best.  They each have their own unique appeal, and they smell really good all mingled together.  It's heavenly.

We're in the alley behind Main Avenue in historic downtown Northport, so you either have to stumble upon us, or know where to look.  Downtown Northport is a small, quaint, walking district.  It consists of barely a block and a half, both sides, of shops including an old fashioned five and dime, a fully stocked hardware store, a couple of antiques shops, a couple of home furnishing stores, a couple of dress shops, a folk art museum, an old fashioned barber shop, two hair salons and some art galleries and studios.  Oh yeah, and City Cafe and the Globe, whose own smells compliment ours, consisting mainly of bacon and onions and garlic and shrimp.  On a really good day, you can also smell the smoky flavors of Dreamland Barbecue, which is a couple of blocks away.

We used to have sandwich signs out on the sidewalk pointing our direction, until the city of Northport enacted a rather strict sign ordinance, but that's a whole other story...

I wish we could pipe the smells  out to Main Avenue (it's been suggested) so people could just follow their noses back to the alley.  Once you get close, the smell does draw you in. It starts right outside our porch when we are baking, especially in the cooler weather.  Come on down, as they say here, and try it for yourself.  You won't be disappointed.

Second most common thing people say when they walk in?  "Wow, if I worked here I'd be as big as a horse..."  Ever wonder why chef pants have elastic waistbands?

How to make a banana split cake

The banana split cake was an accident.  A nice accident.  We had some banana-nut bread batter left over from making individual loaves.  Not enough to pour into a loaf pan, but too much to throw out.  I considered making muffins, but it was Saturday, and they would be sitting out or frozen until Monday, when they would no longer be fresh.

 We poured the batter into muffin top pans (and you thought they just cut the tops off muffins...).  They look like little cake pans you might make baby cakes out of.  Like the kind I used to make in my Easy-Bake Oven when I was about eight years old.  Then we brushed the little cakes with rum (the official reason was to keep them from drying out...).  At this point, they sat all wrapped up in plastic) in the freezer for a while, until last week when we took them out and piped a generous amount of caramel icing between two cakes, topped the stacked layers with swirled vanilla buttercream, then drizzled warm ganache over the entire cake, and garnished the dessert with chopped nuts and a candied cherry. These little babies needed a nice presentation, so they were placed on individual gold boards.

We made 18 cakes, which sold out in a couple of hours.  I knew we had a winner when one of our customers called back a few days later to say how good they were.  This is a guy who is always brutally honest, especially if it hurts.

All of these recipes are in our new cookbook, but you can use any recipe you like.  For this dessert it is all about the assembly.

Banana Split Cake Ingredients

• Banana-Nut Bread Batter
• Caramel Icing
• Buttercream Icing
• Ganache
• Chopped  Pecans
• Candied Cherries
• Individual Cake Boards

You will also need the following specialty baking and decorating tools:

• Muffin Top Pans
• Pastry Bags
• Large Star Tip

Assembly Instructions

1. Bake the banana-nut bread in muffin top pans, using a 2-ounce scoop (or disher) to neatly and evenly scale out the batter.
2. Make the buttercream, ganache and caramel icing. We whip the caramel icing until fluffy to make it easier to pipe.
3. When the banana cakes are done and out of the pans, brush each generously with rum using a pastry brush.
4. Pipe about an inch-worth of caramel icing on half of the cakes, using a pastry bag fitted with a large star tip.
5. Place an un-iced cake layer  on top of each iced layer.
6. Pipe a generous amount of buttercream on top of the stacked cake, using a large star tip.
7. Drizzle some warm ganache on top of the iced cakes and top with chopped pecans and a candied cherry.

Or, if you live in the Tuscaloosa-Northport area, call us and we'll make some for you.

Be Nice or Leave: Kentuck Festival of the Arts

Here in Northport, Alabama, the third weekend in October is reserved for Kentuck, a folk art festival that draws about 20,000 people to our small city.  The festival is held about a mile down the road from Mary's Cakes, so we get a constant flurry of folks in and out of the shop all day Saturday and Sunday.

One of my favorite artists at Kentuck is Robert "Dr. Bob" Shaffer -- well known for his “Be Nice or Leave" signs.  He lives in New Orleans and stayed through Katrina.

Like almost all of the businesses in downtown Northport, we have a "Be Nice or Leave" sign in our shop.  Ours is not very big, but nicely trimmed in bottle caps.  It sits next to our cash register as a reminder to us (and hopefully to our customers) that life is not meant to be taken too seriously, especially time spent in the bakery.

We get a lot of comments on the sign, the first of which came from my mother, who was shocked that we would display such a message.  "What if you offend someone?"  I tried to explain that anyone who might be offended by such a sign was probably not going to be a long term customer at Mary's.  We agreed to disagree.

My brother and I spent some time this morning at the festival and I ordered a special sign from Dr. Bob.  This one will say "No Screaming at Mary's."  I love kids and have twelve nieces and nephews.  I love when they come into the bakery.  We give free cookies to children, which usually makes them all smiley and happy.  I especially love happy kids. This is a bakery -- what's not to be happy about?

We have one set of young customers, twins, who have been coming to Mary's since they were two weeks old.  Their mom is great. She has a policy:  No screaming at Mary's.  Even when they were really small and came in almost daily (mom wanted a chocolate coated brownie), they'd be immediately escorted out of the bakery if they started screaming.  There must have been some successful subliminal messaging going on because they rarely scream in the shop. They were the inspiration for today's request from Dr. Bob.

I realize that the target audience for our new sign -- the under five, sleep deprived and starving child -- probably cannot read, but it will make us feel better knowing that the responsible party is on alert that if the free cookie we always give to children (well behaved or otherwise) does not do the trick, then the little darling should be escorted outside.

The other Mary Cesar: Hawaiian quilter and cook

I got interested in quilting a very long time ago.  Then about 20 years ago I began making Hawaiian quilts.  I had been on vacation in Hawaii and was fascinated by the quilt patterns and designs which are unique to the islands.  For many years I traveled a lot on business and (obviously before 9/11) brought pillow-sized patterns to quilt on the plane.  It was something portable that I could do to pass the time while sitting in an airplane seat or at the airport.

I don't do it much any more, but the remnants of that hobby are everywhere in my life.  Almost all my friends and family have at least one pillow, and this is one of three quilt squares on the wall in the "Garden Room" adjoining the bakery which we rent out for parties.

I have known for a while that there is a Mary Cesar living in Hawaii.  Her full name is Mary Haunani Cesar.  She is a master quilt maker and teacher.  She apparently cooks as well, because there are recipes on her website.

She teaches classes in basic design (Hawaiian quilts are designed and cut by folding a square into eighths, much like a paper snowflake).  The cut design is appliqued onto a background and the quilting radiates from the central pattern like ripples in water.

She sounds like someone I would like to meet.  And I am dying to try the macadamia nut pie and mango bread recipes.