When bakeries close for vacation, everything stops. Workers stop going to work, deliveries stop, and money stops coming in. This is usually the time when bakeries are the slowest. Bakeries close for improvement and sometime just to give the owners sometime off. In my opinion though, bakeries should never close. I understand slow times but if your not open you can not make any money. Also you can possibly lose customers who now have to go somewhere else for their sweet treat of the day. Paying your employees is also money going out with nothing coming in. I believe that every bakery should be able to have employees and owners go on vacation at different time while the bakery is still open and operational. I believe that there is only one reason ever to close and that would be your oven broke down!

Every bride wants to have something special at her wedding. Some brides opt for small personal sized tiered cakes for each guest rather than one large cake. These cakes are basically made the same as their larger version with the exception of them being tiny. Many personal sized tiered cakes are two tiers. You can have the cake decorated in any fashion you want. Make sure to remember that the more detailed the cake, the higher the price is going to be. Generally a large tiered cakes for 100 people will cost less than 100 personal sized tiered cakes. Below are are a few examples of personal sized tiered cakes.

Boy am I tired of hearing the phrase “That is not what I ordered, I want it free”. I follow the order form in front of me, if it is not written down I do not do it. Maybe you forgot to tell the sales girl properly what you ordered or maybe you think that if you complain you can get something for free? Yep that is it you want something for free. We know your trick everyone is doing it now. Here it is -

• You place a order for exactly what you want
•  than you come in to pickup your order, you act rushed the whole time
• your order comes out just liked you wanted but you say it is wrong
•  you ask for a manager who offers to fix it for you
•  you say that your late and very unhappy with our bakery
• you say that you will not be coming back
•  you have not paid yet
• so you say I shouldn’t have to pay for something that is not right
•  so you say I should get this for free
•  we do not want to lose business so we give in to your request

Now you walk out happy as a clam with your perfectly made cake that you just got for free.

Why would you want a fake cake when you can have a real one? I charge the same amount for both real and fake. I know that I have to do one less step when making a fake cake but the labor is just as hard. It does not take me any less time when I am decorating a fake cake compared to a real one. So why would I charge less? In fact it might actually cost me more, due to me having to buy materials and work with materials that will not go bad. Also what are you going to do with that 4 tired cake I make you? Do you have room for it in your home? Will you treasure it forever? Do you know that they get incredibly dusty and colors eventually fade? Why would you want to buy one fake cake and than buy sheet cakes to feed your guest? You probably are not even going to buy the sheet cakes from me. You will probably go to the closest or cheapest supermarket and buy subpar sheet cakes and pass them off as mine. This is one great reason that I do not offer fake cakes!

I work for a family business. The parents own the business and all the children work here. They drive everyone nuts when they fight. They talk about each other behind everyone’s back to the employees. When one sibling gets mad at the other they pick on employees.

I should not have to deal with this, I am a employees of the business not a family member. Family fights should be had at home not in the work place. If they disagree with each other over something, why do I have to know about it? You guys are making my job harder than it should be.

Eight people should not all be my direct manager, I should have one. I think you guys need to figure out a way to get along when you are working together. When I have a question and I ask one manager you should not tell me to ignore him/her. It puts me in the middle and leads me to be confused on what to do. Set up a system of order, rank your managers in number order of who I should listen to over others and don’t put me in the middle anymore.

How many times do I have to say  ”Make sure to label that”? Labeling every product is essential to your business. There is nothing worse than not knowing what goo is in this bucket or how old it is.

One day in work I need cream cheese icing, we buy a base and add to it to make it our own. So I asked one of the guys to pull it out of the refrigerator for me. He pulled out the bucket with the original cream cheese label on it, we opened it up to see what was inside. It looked like our cream cheese icing and it had the original label on it, so off I went with it. A few hours later after I had use the “icing” I looked in the bucket only to see some melted cake batter. Now who’s fault was that? Mine, the guy who pulled it out, or the person who put cake batter in the bucket and did not label it. All of us should assume some blame for it, but it mainly fell on the baker who did not label the bucket. If the bucket would have been labeled properly we would have never had an issue.

So now I say, label and date everything that you do. There is no need for preventable mistakes.

This post is not related to my usual Cake Design posts,  but thought I’d post it anyway.  I moved recently and I realized that I needed to update my kitchen. My kitchen dates back to the 1950s and I do not think that anything has ever been updated since back then. I mean it took me ten minutes to cook two eggs! So I have decided to completely gut my kitchen. I got a new kitchen sink 43 x 22, appliances, counters, even down to new plates, large soup bowls, and my favorite luigibormioli white wine glasses. It took quite a while and alot of money but my new kitchen now looks great! It is so nice to come home to a new place and cook dinner in a kitchen that I designed myself!

Everyone gets sick at some point and time. Most of us suck it up and go to work anyway. However, there are times that we are just to sick to go in so we call out. Now I have worked at many different places and every business has different call out policies. Some places I just needed to leave a message with someone who will in turn relay it to a manager. Other places I can leave a call out message on a machine, while others I need to speak directly to a manager.

The place I currently work at I have to place several different calls or text messages and hope someone eventually gets back to me. When I first started I was told to call one person and let them know. I did that, but they sometimes would not answer their phone or texts. So I was stuck calling my work or other co workers to let my management know.

There needs to be something done about this. I need to know that my messages are going through to the management. They should let me know what I need to do in reference to calling out. Whatever it is, they should decide to do it and stick with it, because calling a bunch of people when your sick is no fun.

I am tired of having to take the blame for bad management. It is not always my fault. Maybe if you took the order right or filed it correctly we would not be having this problem now. I’m your decorator, not your secretary. I should not have to check email and write up orders for you. That is what your sales girls are for. 

In my job I make orders that are written on order forms. If these orders are written up wrong, that is not my fault. How am I suppose to know that the customer wants chocolate fudge filling if it is not written down? The order takers are the ones that need to give me all the information I need to complete my tasks.

There needs to be a standard operating practice so everyone knows how to take a order correctly. The management needs to stand behind their rules and enforce them. This way it will be easier to prevent mistakes and asking the question “Who’s fault is this”?

Organization is a great key for success when running a business. If you have everything organized it makes your life much easier. You will know what time you need product by, where product is going, and who is making the product.

I like to be organized at all times. My mornings consist of the same opening procedure each and everyday. This way I will not forget to do something. After I finish my morning procedure, I do my work in time order. I take into account how long I have left in the day and what need to be completed in that time frame. I also leave time in my day for “just placed” orders and new products.

When my routine gets messed up I just go with the flow. However sometimes it just gets annoying when my managers throw products at me to finish right before I leave. Even if I asked them if they have anything else for me I usually get a no thanks.  So I start to clean up and than they run back with a tray of something that needs to be finished. If I’m organized why can’t they be.

So the air conditioner broke in the decorating area of our store after one of the worse heat waves of the year. A repair man was called to come fix it but it cost to much to repair, so now we are left in the heat. Let me tell you our buttercream does not like 70 degree and over temperatures. Our flowers won’t stand up pretty and our layer cakes get a spare tire due to the heat. Wedding cakes shift, slide, and sometimes fall apart because of warm buttercream. We are left to redo many cakes that just did not make it.  Doing things twice means a waste of working time. So how is it that you will not put money out to fix the air conditioner but will get mad when things go south? It is your fault we do not have air conditioning, it is not our fault that the buttercream is melting.

My job could be so much easier if people just learned how to take a order. I do not understand why it is so hard to do. All you have to do is ask the customer what they want and write it down. We have books that quote prices, flavors, sizes, and even decorations. Still our sales girls get orders wrong constantly. Even when they are told to have all orders checked by managers, there are still issues with them.

Let me be perfectly clear to you sales girls, it is not hard to take a order! Here is the method to use- ask what size, cake flavor, icing flavor, colors of flowers, and colors of writing the customer wants. Than refer to the book for your price. It is in there I know I have checked it many times before.

If the customer wants some funky buttercream color, ask them to bring in a swatch. I do not know what color they are thinking of when they say “ya know wine watermelon fuschia”. What color is that? If I look up that color online three thousand different colors will come up. Also, please be able to understand your own writing. How will I ever be able to finish a cake, if I ask you a question and you do not understand what you wrote?

I love taking pictures. My camera is with me at all times. Every new cake I do, I take a picture of. These are my pictures. They are for my own personal use and portfolio. They are not yours. If you want to upgrade your photo books or website take your own pictures. For as long as I have worked here you have not once brought your own camera in here. Why do you expect me to waste my time taking pictures for you, crop them at home, put them on a usb, than download them to your computer? I have done this before for you. Do you know what you did with them? Nothing. In fact you asked me to go one step further and get them printed out for you. That is not my job, it is yours. The next time you want to update your pictures, take your own!

Raising prices is sometimes a hard decision to make. You must factor in a lot of things like… will people still buy my product, what am I paying for it, and what am I making off of it, and how much should  I sell it for. Recently my bakery which is for sale decided that we should raise our prices again. They have been raised every year that I have worked here by the way.  So everything went up about one dollar. Now to some people a dollar raise is not that much but when you factor in that a 6 inch cake that serves 4-6 people is $16, that’s a lot! We already have extremely high prices. We are not competitive with other bakeries, we are higher that all of them. The owners also do not  know how much profit they are making off of their products. I know this because I asked everyone involved. I think we are now losing business at one of the busiest times of the year due to our price increase. They seem to think it’s the economy but I tend to disagree!

This is our Winter Wonderland Cake and cupcakes. It is any size cake, covered with buttercream frosting. We than cover that with clear sanding sugar and add fondant snowflakes.