Cake Talk

Good Cake Day

We had several nice cakes today, but these two are our favorites.

It's Halloween on Saturday, so a witch's hat is entirely on point.  The brim is a 14-inch round cake.  The top of the hat is a two-layer 6-inch round cake, topped with several inches of formed rice crispy treats.

The entire cake is covered in buttercream and topped with black ganache.  Then we sprinkled on lots of edible glitter before stacking the two parts.  Several skewers will keep the parts stacked straight for travel.

The little mice are made from fondant, and the spiderwebs are spun sugar.  We got to play with lots of fun stuff for this cake!!

The soccer ball cake is for one of the ladies on the University of Alabama soccer team.

The base is a simple chocolate cake and the soccer ball is molded from rice crispy treats (our new "favorite" molding medium).  The ball is covered with white fondant and black fondant pentagons were placed to finish the decoration. The bow is fondant; the stars are gum paste.

I must admit a soccer ball is not nearly as easy to make as a football, basketball, volleyball, golf ball, or just about any other kind of sport ball.

But we had fun and we get to do it again tomorrow.

Antiques Roadshow

Happy Birthday Wendell Garrett.

The appraiser, of Antiques Roadshow fame, is celebrating his 80th birthday in Tuscaloosa today with cake from Mary's.

Three cakes -- strawberry, chocolate and white -- covered in marble fondant and luster dust, resemble old books.

We had the funnest time making them and hope he enjoys his birthday.  Wonder what kind of appraisal they will get...

Farm Cake

Who says you can't have your cake and veggies too?

We've done barns and boots and dirt bike trails and golf holes. Game day tents on icing "grass," logs, tree stumps, duck ponds, a volcano, a mountain, a lake and a construction site.

And now a field of fall veggies, all piped along neat rows of chocolate butter cream icing and chocolate cake crumb dirt.  On top of two layers of red velvet "red clay" soil.

There are beets and pumpkins, yellow squash, lettuce, red cabbage and sunflowers.

So if you are an organic farmer celebrating your birthday, what more could you possibly want?

Better Week

After last week's cake disasters, I needed a more positive experience.  We got that this week.  Adding to today's 53-7 win over North Texas, we had a good cake week.

I got my car back.

None of the cakes imploded.

The delivery to Birmingham not only went smoothly, but the folks at Gabriella Manor (where the wedding was being held) were utterly sweet, professional, and helpful.  The property is beautiful, and the staff thinks of every little detail.  They even offered that they were cutting the cake and asked if there was anything they should know about the way it was constructed.  Nobody EVER asks us that.  They had already set out boxes (out of sight) for any extra cake that might need to be packed and asked us what to do with the cake stands (give them to the bride's mother).  I could not have asked for a nicer or better prepared team to work with.

Melina's, the new restaurant on the corner of 5th and Main Avenue opened yesterday, with a soft opening (friends and family) on Thursday.  The food is fabulous.  I had to chuckle when the server told me about the wonderful red velvet cake and cappuccinn gelato they had for dessert. (I chose the creme brulee, which we did NOT make, but was perfection -- just the right combination of cold custard and warm just-torched sugar.  Yum. We wish them well.

All the cakes got picked-up, on time.

A man who had bounced a check a few weeks ago even came by to apologize and make it good.

We got two large orders for mid-week next week -- one for a sorority and one for a University of Alabama event.  Roll Tide!!

Oh yeah, and we got a call, out of the blue, from Cakes Across America.  They are a service much like Teleflora where you can order a cake to be delivered anywhere in the country (probably not ANYWHERE...).  They had an order for Tuscaloosa that they wanted us to fill.  And paid us our full price (wow! no discount necessary).

So, there you are.  A week sans-disaster.

Tomorrow I'm going to Leeds (just east of Birmingham) to hear Bobby Horton.

Monday I'll be a student again, taking the ServSafe course and exam.

And here is a photo of today's wedding cake as a finishing touch.  Have a nice weekend!

But what I really meant was...

People see our bakery and have all sorts of interesting expectations.  And, when you work in retail, you are taught that the customer is always right. So I try to be as agreeable as possible when dealing with customers. And I almost always mean what I say. Except when what I really meant was something entirely different.  Here are a few examples...

Customer:  Can you do this three tier cake to serve 50 people by this afternoon?
Me: No, I am so sorry but we are already totally booked for the next couple of days.
BWIRMW: You must be kidding...did you think we could just whip up and bake three cakes, let them cool, then ice, decorate and stack them in just two hours?

Customer: Will you bake my wedding cake the morning of the wedding?
Me: Your cake will be as fresh as possible.
BWIRMW: And your wedding is at 11am?  Do you have any idea how long it takes to bake, cool, ice, decorate and stack a wedding cake?

Customer: Where is your fresh bread? I really love your fresh bread.
Me: We're baking fresh bread on Thursdays now.
BWIRMW: We stopped baking bread daily almost two years ago, so I guess it's been a while since you bought any of that bread you really love.

Customer:  I am having an employee meeting tomorrow, could you donate some cookies?
Me: If you are having a fund raiser for charity, we would be happy to donate a gift card, but we do not donate our food products.
BWIRMW: Wow, I never even thought of asking a business to DONATE something to give to my employees.

Customer:  I have a recipe for my grandmother's pound cake, can you make me one for tomorrow?
Me: No, but could I recommend a personal chef or caterer?
BWIRMW: Hmmm, let me see... tie up our mixers, ovens and employees for one pound cake? Yeah, right.

Just smile and wave, boys, smile and wave.

Cake 911

If any bakery ever tells you nothing bad has ever happened to their cakes, DON'T BELIEVE THEM!!  We've had 24 hours worth of disasters and I am thankful we'll be closed the next two days.

It started when I sent Ben, one of my very good workers, over to the Bryant Museum, in my car, to pick up the cake stands from their birthday celebration for Coach Paul W. "Bear" Bryant.

"The car sputtered and died" reported Ben over the phone about ten minutes later.

OK, well the car has been acting weird lately, but not being very car-savvy, I guess I didn't realize the severity of its little hiccups, thinking they could be cured with gas additive.  (That approach HAS worked in the past.)

It's 4pm on Friday before the first home football game and Ben is holding up traffic. And, as just another guy with a car problem, nobody is stopping to help him move the darn thing off the road.  Did I mention it was raining?  Emily went over to help him out.  Not one, not two, but three guys immediately stopped to see if she needed any help with the car.

Fast forward...I called AAA, got the car towed back to the shop and rented a minivan.  A small fortune, but this is Tuscaloosa, which has no commercial airport, which means no big rental car agencies.  Just Enterprise.  Which happened to have just one car left.  I took it.

By Saturday morning I am almost over the car fiasco.  Sam's Club didn't have everything I needed, but I called ahead to the bakery and Emily agreed to run to the local store to pick up the rest of the stuff we needed before I got in.  I was expecting an uneventful day, with everything done well before the 6pm kick-off.

I am greeted with the news that a four tier birthday cake, which was just picked-up, was missing an important architectural support piece.  The hows and whys are a very long story, but the cake was now a disaster waiting to happen.  The bigger problem was that nobody was answering the phone number we had for the customer.  Luckily her husband is a doctor, and the answering service was able to contact him.  We iced a completely NEW four tier cake, decorated just like the original, but with all the proper supports, and delivered it to the customer's house about 15 minutes before the party started.

I figured that was it for the day, but I was wrong.  One of our wedding deliveries was in Reform, about 30 miles west of Northport.  A car stopped abruptly in front of me on the highway. I stepped on the brakes and the cake stand slid in the back of my rental minivan. I heard that soft "plop" that no baker making a delivery EVER wants to hear.  Emily, who was riding shotgun, glanced over shoulder and uttered "oh shit."  I pulled over and opened the back to see cake pieces and icing all over the floor of the van.

Thank God for cell phones.  And the fact that there were enough people working in the bakery today so that one could make the other wedding delivery.  One could speed over to Reform with more icing, spatulas, and other supplies.  Yes, we do bring an "emergency" bucket with tools and icing, but this cake was way past that and needed a major operation.

With three of us now working, we got the cake scraped and re-iced, stacked and decorated before the bridal party arrived.  It looks pretty good, doesn't it?  And that is caramel icing, not chocolate (except for the small dark ganache border).

Now I really need a drink.

And yes, that photo at the top of this post is the back of my rental van, after we removed the damaged cake.

Happy Birthday Coach!

So here they are, two birthday cakes for legendary Alabama football coach Paul W. "Bear" Bryant.

The Bryant Museum is open until 4:00 p.m.  Have a visit, have some cake and cookies, and get in the spirit for tomorrow.

Happy Birthday and Roll Tide!

Psychadelic Cake!

I remember the 60's and the 70's.  I'm not proud, but I remember.

The bell bottoms.  The platform shoes.  The mini skirts.  The crochet vests.  The macrame belts.  The plaids.  The straight stringy hair.  The bandanas.  The tie-die.  You probably have your favorite style memories too.

I guess this is hip again.  We've done several "tie-die" cakes in the last several weeks, but his was by far the largest.

And yeah, it was fun!

Paul "Bear" Bryant's Birthday

This is Tuscaloosa, home of the Crimson Tide.  And perhaps the most famous college football coaches of all times, Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant.  He was born on September 11, 1913, so his birthday is coming up next week.  The fact that he died 26 years ago is not even relevant.  The Paul W. Bryant Museum (where the season never ends...) on the University of Alabama Campus will be celebrating and we're making the birthday cakes!!

The cakes are going to be square (red velvet!) with a houndstooth border and red trim.  The larger cake will have a hat on top; the smaller cake will play host to a chocolate football.  We're also making football and houndstooth hat cookies.  We'll post pictures of course...

Sonic the Hedgehog

I had never heard of Sonic before this.  But we're really close now... He's carved from a 6-inch round and a 10-inch square chocolate cake, with a couple of cupcakes for each foot, and a some white cake scraps for  his gloves.  The name "Highland" is made up of cookies-on-sticks.  Pretty cute, huh?  We had all the little kids in the neighborhood plotting for their next birthday cakes...

No weddings, but a bunch of cute birthday cakes this weekend.  Among them, a cowboy boot for David's 3rd birthday, a scrabble board for "Memaw's" 80th, a pottery "planter" full of cookie flowers for Marysia, a tropical beach with waterfall for Kayla, Bryant-Denny Stadium, a rock-star themed cake, Mario on a motorcycle, a castle cake, two cammoflage cakes, a couple of stacked package cakes, and several dozen cookies.

Next week we start making cakes for Malena's the new restaurant opening in the corner building across the alley (where The Globe was).  We'll be doing dessert cakes for them.  They start training wait and kitchen staff on Wednesday so we're making them some sample cakes.  And Saturday is OPENING DAY!! for the Crimson Tide.  This game will be played in Atlanta, but followed by three home games in September.  Which means lots of Alabama-Themed cookies.