Clever Cake Studio

I had done the WoW cake and the Poker Chip cake on the same evening.  I was very proud of accomplishing both before midnight.

For my Valentine’s Special, I have so far completed 3 of the 4 cakes, two of which have just arrived this morning to their new (and last) home in New York.  Shipping cakes is a tricky ordeal.

I also was honored to do some treats for the Sweet Petula Trunk Show that’s happening today and tomorrow at her store in Pioneer Square.  Sweet Petula offers handmade bath, body and home products.  They are also pairing with Sweet Anthem, handmade perfumes by a friend of mine.  Now they also have homemade lavender cookies, almond-anise biscotti, and sweet petit fours (chocolate mint, chai, and strawberry) for customers to snack as they browse.  Go venture out and get some great deals on lovely products!

So…  In the making of these cakes and treats I learned some valuable lessons.  One in particular stood out.

Chefs and bakers are insane.

To be a good cook, you only need to like cooking and learn some techniques.  You can even be a great cook and really love food.  But there is something different about the people who make a succesful career of it.  They are driven.  They make it happen.  You can call it passion or just sheer efficency, but these craftsmen can crank out fabulous works of edible art, hardly non of which will survive the day, to huge numbers of hungry, picky, busy, indifferent, hyped-up, and otherwise varied customers.

I consider cooking and baking a craft.  The basic techniques used and planning towards an item make or break the entire result.  I consider the understanding of flavors, colors, textures, and other elements to be the artistic side, the culinary arts.

In the world of cakes and other treats, baking is a science.  Finding the perfect balance of ingrediants to get the flavor, texture, moistness, and so on that you’re looking for can take time and means many practice runs (and lots of waste cake to fatten the household up).  I recommend Alton Brown’s ‘I’m Just Here for More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking‘ book, which is great as helping to understand why all ingrediants should be room temperature before mixing, what each ingrediant does to the whole.  It’s very awesome.  I haven’t tried his recipes, I just like the learnings.

But after the perfect recipe skillfully carried out, your crafting skills are put to new use - making it look good.  This can be painstaking as any art.  Trying to do just one can be time-consuming and exhausting, and as I’ve discovered this week, trying to get several things done at once is just mind-bending.

Granted, I don’t have the best of work spaces.  I have a small, 70’s gallery kitchen, one standard oven with a hot spot in the back left, little to no counter space, two fridges (one inside for cakes and our daily stuff, the second in the garage for drinks, bulk eggs and butter, and extra frozen stuff), and a dining room table that acts as entry table and kitchen island (my husband jokingly complains when I get powdered sugar on his wallet and keys).   My baking and decorating tools were only recently pulled together into plastic bins, and I have to get some portable shelves to really organize it all.

I really wonder what I could manage with more elbow room, but then again, some of the most amazing chefs work in practically inhuman conditions - high constant heat, standing in the same spot to cook, having to most fast and relentlessly to push out dozens of meals an hour.

Thus back to my point.  I meander a lot.  I’m also very tired.  See, to finish what I’ve done so far, I gave up sleep.  Willingly, and, oddly, not bitterly.  I didn’t sleep at all yesterday night, got a 4 hour nap later in the day, and then tonight I slept for 2 hours.  I had to finish what I promised, there was no other option.

Now, a big part of the reason that this took so long was poor planning on my part.  This exercise has been a major lesson in time management and planning for orders, and I feel like I’ll be able to handle this load level in the future with far more grace and sleep.  There were also some little bumps - the awesome shop I buy fondant from was sold out, so I had to make it myself.

I used this recipe for fondant.  Do you like making bread?  You know how messy it is, especially when you’re new to it and haven’t learned just the right techniques and consistencies yet?  Fondant is worse.  However, I also feel very proud to have made it, and it was good-tasting, had a nice texture.  It was sticky, which probably means I don’t have my proportion of powdered sugar quite right.  I spent quite a lot of time having to scrub fondant off my table because I wasn’t re-dusting with the sugar constantly.  Yeah, there was much cursing.

So after two days, 20-something hours of cake work, my regular day job, and 6 hours of sleep… I feel strangely content.  Individually, a lot of the tasks were mundane and even tedious.  I look at the finished product and immediately will think of ten things I could have done better.  Yet, as a whole, I really enjoy doing this.  I feel very accomplished.  I challenged myself and I met my goals.

A big downside to my time managment issues was that I wasn’t able to take a photo of any of the cakes and treats so far.  I’ve asked those clients (all friends) to take photos for me, and I’ll make posts with any I get.

Something you should know… There is one incredibly vital, invaluable thing you need if you want to do this a lot.  Support from friends and family.

My family, consisting of my husband and our roommate (who is pretty much a sister to me) have been absolutely amazing.  If I’m horribly pressed, they will do store runs, cook/mix/bake up a recipe I give them, clean up after me (I’m a tornado of powdered sugar, paper towels, fondant bits and messy tools), cheer nme up if I get discouraged and act as official taste-testers on everything (so you know you’re not being poisoned).  If they weren’t so supportize, I wouldn’t have the time to decorate anything, much less sculpt funky cakes or make gumpaste flowers.

They are both wonderful and I love them.  Thank you for everything!! Everything on this blog is in big part thanks to them.

And thanks to all the friends and friends-of-friends who have comissioned a cake from me.  I really appreciate your patronage.  I’ve been able to learn SO MUCH over this past year and I’m feeling more excited about it all the time.

Also, thanks to all of you who have been reading this blog and following along with my trials and errors.  Thanks for sharing it with your friends!  The encouragment has really been wonderful and helped me stick with it when my inner critic is so loud.

Thanks for putting up with my meandering, tangent-galore style of writing, too.