Halloween

October 26, 2010: Halloween

A holiday synonymous with goodies and treats, Halloween is once again upon us.  A mere five days away from today young children will fill the streets looking for candies and in their schools they will be having parties with all kinds of baked goods.  That's where I come in.  The bakery has been asked to develop some new designs for the cakes and cupcakes that we have on display.  I have developed several cake designs such as a large gravestone covered in red gel "blood and these cakes that you see below:

The first cake design is simple.  All these cakes have been given a purple Bettercream frosting with a chocolate ganache coating over the top.  Chocolate ganache, for those who do not know, is a rich chocolate that is generally melted and shaped to put on desserts.  This was a vanilla cake with a vanilla cupcake on top turned into a jack-o-lantern.  

 The second design is a graveyard scene.  In the background is a dead rotting tree made from a vanilla cupcake and halved Chips Ahoy cookies for branches with a sugar ghost popping out.  The gravestones were made from halved Oreo fudge dipped cookies.

The last two were just generic designs: A "Happy Halloween" with 3 plastic rings and one with 4 sugar ghosts and 4 Oreo gravestones.  Nothing fancy, but they will sell.

More to come from the Halloween season.

Until next time.

Stay Sweet,

Lil' Buddy

Donation

October 25, 2010: Donation

I was approached by one of the cashiers from my store.  She was having a fund raiser for breast cancer awareness and wanted to talk to me about designing a cake.  So we talked it over and what she had wanted was a pink frosted cake with a few rosebuds and a whole bunch of pink breast cancer ribbons.  I told her I would put the cake in through the office as a donation which she greatly appreciated.  This was the final result:

 The cake was vanilla with a pink-dyed Bettercream frosting. 

Breast cancer awareness is an epidemic in this country and countries throughout the world.  To find ways that you can donate please visit www.nationalbreastcancer.org for information.

Until next time.

Stay Sweet,

Lil' Buddy

Sales Record

October 19, 2010:  Sales Record

Last Friday, October 15, 2010, was by far the craziest day that I have ever worked in bake shop in my five years time.  We were missing approximately fifteen hours worth of work for the day and I had to compensate for it.  Three of our part time employees had, whether it be for vacation, illness, or necessity, needed the day off.  It was, once again, Fresh Baked Friday where Italian Bread was on sale for just 99 cents.  My boss told me to do the best that I could with it, but it was killing me.

I was given only nine hours for the day and was expected to do the break out, which takes several hours, prep and cooking of Italian bread, which takes approximately 30-45 minutes per rack, the sales order, which takes an hour, and the supply load, which takes yet another hour.  Altogether it was going to make for an interesting night.

I had to bake bread intermittently while doing the break out.  Every five minutes I would get a call from the manager saying that the bread racks around the store were empty.  It had never sold this way before.  It was a difficult task to even just do the break out and the bread.  I rushed through the sales order and, just as I had finished, the supply load came in.  We received 200 boxes ranging from 15 to 40 pounds, but there was no time to stop.  The bread had to keep going out. 

I am honestly shocked that I was able to complete everything in time and had the time to wash off the counters and sweep and wash the floor. 

I received the numbers the next day and we had sold more bread than we ever had before, 520 loaves.  Considering that I had no help it made for an even more amazing feat.  The store manager was surprised at what we had sold and even more surprised that I was able to do it by myself.  I was given an award to give recognition to "employee excellence."  Pretty much it was a $25 dollar Stop & Shop gift card.  Nothing great, but it was better than a sharp stick in the eye.  Moreover I was happy that I was able to overcome even my own expectations.  Though I do not plan on keeping this job for much longer it was a confidence booster to think that no matter what task I am given I know that I can complete it no matter what challenges or adversities get in the way.  Quite an insight from bread huh?

Until next time.

Stay Sweet,

Lil' Buddy

The Trip

October 19, 2010: The Trip

Holiday season is right around the corner (well technically it's not even close yet but Stop & Shop is already stocked with all the holiday merchandise).  The company has an annual event where all managers and department heads travel to a chosen location to view how the holiday setup is going to be.  Usually it is only managers and department heads, but because of my work ethic and my store manager's push to make me a lead clerk (not going to happen) I was going to be sent to not only help set up, but to sit in on all the meetings and discussions of how the holidays would be handled. 

I guess it is supposed to be a big deal for me to be around these "higher up" people in the company, but I just see them as co-workers.  I went with my department head at around four o'clock in the morning to set up displays.  The event this year was taking place in Woburn, Massachusetts.  The corporate officials are fools; every year they set up the event in an almost dead store.  Their sales are already in the tank and it is very unlikely that they are going to sell even one tenth of the product that we will be putting out.  The point of this exercise is to get a visual representation of how tables are supposed to be set up during the holiday time to market products in a more effective way.  We piled box upon box of gingerbread houses to build a larger gingerbread house.  It was a house of houses pretty much if that makes any sense.  Next up came the pie table.  Pies are key for the holiday season starting around Thanksgiving and going until around New Years.  We set up approximately seven six-foot tables of pies and then moved on to cookies.  Cookies are more for the Christmas season.  Three more tables.  Altogether the work took approximately four hours and there was about $28,000 worth of product on the sales floor for just bakery alone. 

Vice president of the company, Joseph Alejandro, came to speak to everyone about how this year was going to be through the roof in sales and he expects every store to exceed their sales from last year by thousands of dollars.  From there all the department heads from the New England region were taken from table to table and shown how displays should be set up.  I, personally, would much rather be back in the bakery making new products.  My store manager took me to the side and told me that me and my boss should listen closely because the sales in the department are dependent upon us alone.  At the end we were served lunch and sent back to our respective stores with a sales plan for the holidays.  Poor Woburn is expected to sell all this product coded way before even Halloween.  There goes their sales percentage.

Albeit it was a boring day, but all part of the process.

Until next time.

Stay Sweet,

Lil' Buddy

Crazy Day

October 18, 2010: Crazy Day

Though there was seemingly very little work to do today it ended up more crazy and chaotic than usual.  The Malden Stop & Shop has a Dunkin' Donuts built in that has been there unchanged for the last 14 years.  Now is the time of the remodel for the location and construction workers took over all bake shop space so our regular work took almost double the time having to get in and out of our freezer.  The way the bakery is set up we have a large showcase area where all the work is done.  Then off to the left there are two narrow spaces; one being Dunkin' Donuts and the other being a hallway with our freezer, refrigerator, dishwasher, and dish washing sink.  They are increasing the size of the Dunkin' Donuts so that narrow hallway will become more narrow and to make it worse workers had the area filled with ladders, paint, buckets, wood, and were not very happy when they had to move in even the slightest way to accommodate our products coming out. 

We were able to compensate the time wasted and rush to get the work done at a reasonable time.  The main goal for the day was to make cannolis.  Cannolis, for those who don't know, are pastries with a hard outer shell and a ricotta cheese filling.  They are sweet and delicious.  I am currently the only one willing to make the desserts in the store and I wouldn't have it any other way.  Growing up in an Italian family food was major.  My grandmother use to travel to the Italian district of Boston, the North End, for their pastries.  After bringing them home she would inspect them closely and critique how her own work would have been better.  Cannolis were her big issue.  If a cannoli wasn't filled enough with cream she would get so mad and say they were terrible.  Keeping her in mind I fill the cannolis with as much cream as possible and cover them in powdered sugar.  God forbid she come in one day and the package be too light.  These cannolis, however, were for a custom order.  The customer ordered 200 cannolis for a wedding shower and she had bought the ones that I had prepared before and loved them.  So I had to do it.  It took a lot of work and a lot of filling, but they came out stupendous.  Here is a look at the final product:

The customer was satisfied and, had she bought them, I feel my old Italian grandmother would have been satisfied as well. 

Until next time.

Stay Sweet,

Lil' Buddy

Special Order

October 13, 2010: Special Order

A 90 year old woman came in the store today and said that it was her 60th wedding anniversary.  She was having a couple people over and just wanted to get a cake.  She picked one out of the case, but I couldn't let that happen.  This was a huge milestone and I am a sucker for that stuff.  I told her to give me half an hour and I would make a cake for her.  I am not supposed to just make up designs or carve cakes, but I have the ability to and I will use whatever ability I can.  Usually custom orders have to be placed 24 hours in advance, but this was something I wanted to do.  I asked her her favorite colors and asked what her and her husband usually do for their anniversaries (not wanting to hear anything gross though...she IS 90).  She said every year her husband bought her a dozen red roses and he had done that every year since the beginning.  She said the one time he could only afford one red rose was during the depression, but he still managed to bring home that one rose.  Her favorite color was light green so I came up with an odd design, but I liked it:

I didn't get the opportunity to take a picture of the final product, but this was the basic design before all the frills were added.  I made a double layer vanilla cake with Bettercream frosting inside and out.  I put edible dye into the batch to give it a light green color.  On the top I printed one of our edible image sheets of a rose and cut it to fit the cake.  I surrounded it with a small-tip rope border with a bow at the base.  Around the sides I did strands of rosebuds and just little white dots for design.  As Buddy Valastro would say "She'sa lookin' good."  From that point I had the elderly woman retrieve me a picture of her and her husband.  She brought me one from their wedding and I made a white frosting banner across the top.  I printed another edible image with their picture in a faded circle for effect.  Then I wrote "Happy  60th Anniversary".  It came out extremely nice and she was so pleased with it.  

Just another good deed from a minimum wage, under-appreciated Stop & Shop worker.

Stay Sweet,

Lil' Buddy

Another Day Another Project

October 12, 2010: Another Day Another Project

My boss finally came back to work.  Things have been running like crazy.  We already started getting pie orders for the Thanksgiving season (we usually sell about $20,000 combined during the week before and the week of Thanksgiving).  The smaller Malden store did not receive product that was supposed to be on sale this week so our workload has almost doubled to try to make these little cupcakes that probably won't sell in their store anyways.  The store manager asked us to make them so it was up to me to do it.  Total for this day I made approximately 800 of these packs of cupcakes.  200 will go to small Malden and the rest we will sell.  Ironically of those 200 that store will probably sell one.  Do these look good to you?

These are authentic Oreo cookie cupcakes.  They are a chocolate cupcake with Oreo Bettercream frosting and half of a Double Stuf Oreo on top.

These are Chips Ahoy cupcakes.  They are a vanilla cupcake base with Chips Ahoy Bettercream on top and half of a Chips Ahoy cookie.


I meant to do this sooner, but just so you guys get a feel of what I am talking about when I say Bettercream this is what I am talking about:

It is the one pure white frosting that we have.  Others such as fresh whipped cream or traditional frosting have a yellowish hue.  Traditional frosting is the usual type that you would have on a cupcake; very sweet and solid.  Whipped cream tastes exactly like whipped cream out of the can.  Bettercream is a completely different taste.  It is sweet, but whipped.  It has a kind of marshmallow flavor.

Until Next Time.

Stay Sweet,

Lil' Buddy