Skinny Wednesday

Everybody is exhausted after all the craziness of millions of King's Cakes for Mardi Gras, but it's all well worth it when you get something like this from a customer...

"Hey Stephanie,
I just wanted to say thank you for hands down the most delicious King Cake I have ever eaten. I lived in New Orleans for 5 years… then a job brought me here. This is my 3rd Fat Tuesday away from the city and both the last ones I had cakes flown in from a New Orleans bakery. Everyone at my office has agreed that this has been the best one.

Thanks!!!"

My Profile

I thought I'd update my profile today...here are the choices for industry:

Not Specified
Accounting
Advertising
Agriculture
Architecture
Arts
Automotive
Banking
Biotech
Business Services
Chemicals
Communications or Media
Construction
Consulting
Education
Engineering
Environment
Fashion
Government
Human Resources
Internet
Investment Banking
Law
Law Enforcement
Manufacturing
Maritime
Marketing
Museum or Libraries
Non-Profit
Publishing
Real Estate
Religion
Science
Sports or Recreation
Student
Technology
Telecommunications
Tourism
Transporation

That's quite a lot of options, and not one of them concerning food, food service, baking, even hospitality. For one thing, aren't food, clothing and shelter the primary things we humans need to survive? I see fashion made the cut, and so did real estate, but food apparently isn't that important. And it's not just on the Google profile I can't find my profession, it's everywhere. I am hurt.

I am thinking I can say that I am in the Biochemistry industry, as I'm taking biological materials and chemically altering them through baking. Or maybe I'm in the arts as there really is an art to what I do; however I guess there's an art to many of the other disciplines on the list. I used to be in the internet field, but am not now, so I can't put that even though I've got a blog and a site on the internet, but that's just silly. I could say Tourism as many of our customers are from out of town, but I'm really reaching then.

When I became a pastry chef, I thought food was really important. It's important to me. Well, actually, good food is important to me. It's probably the most abundant thing in our country, and we've all got cushy thighs to prove it. But nobody knows who's making our food. Well I am one of those people.

Trickiness with Discounts

I've been getting several calls by people wanting to order larger numbers of our frosted cookies. They're currently $2.25/ea or roughly $2.08 for a dozen. It's been really difficult because even though we've been even able to even reduce the price for larger orders, it's still not quite enough for most people.

I do feel the cookies, even though they might seem expensive to some people, are a good value, when you consider the work that goes into them. They are actually one of our most labor intensive of our products. We don't have a machine to make them so each one is cut out. We have a small deck of ovens so baking high volumes can be a challenge. Each one needs to be frosted and decorated individually by hand, and while we can be more efficient at higher volumes, we still have to pour the love into those cookies. So for a $300 cookie order which seems like a lot of money, we might work 5-7 hours, which may seem like we're making $60/hour which seems like a lot for a baker, but then you have ingredients, overhead, and such. I know at my final wages, I certainly couldn't afford them, but I know that there's just no short cuts for good quality.