Mini Kitchen Tour

I have had many public and private requests from a lot of you asking for a video tour of my baking kitchen.  Well, it's been a long time coming, but I finally had a slow week in the bakery where Chad and I could finish the video.  I hope the extra information I have provided afterward will be worth the delay.

 

If the video fails to play, click here to view

To follow up on our mini kitchen tour video, we are listing some of the main items that we have in our commercial kitchen.  These items are exactly what we have or are as close as possible because things change in eight years :)

We spent quite a bit of time making an Amazon store with categories and descriptions of how we used the item.  There is a commercial kitchen category that lists many items that we will show in the longer video tour later.  Full disclosure, we will make a few pennies if you buy from our pretty pink Amazon shop!  So shop away!

OUR AMAZON STORE 

http://astore.amazon.com/cuadeca-20


Restaurant Equippers is THE best place online for restaurant supplies.  We found that our local restaurant supply buys some items from these guys, marks them up and sells them! When we bought the giant commercial fridge, they only charged $80 to ship it!  Now, they don't bring it in and set it up, but that's what strong friends are for!

TABLES
Big Work able with mixers on it
Drawer for 30" wide tables
Two work tables that have custom laminate top over both 
Drawers  for 24"wide tables 
3 Compartment Sink  
Faucet
Cooling rack (this isn't the one I have, but if I was buying it again this would be the one!
Reach-in Fridge
Icing buckets
Ingredient bins

IKEA can be very inexpensive, if you get the right items.  Buying cabinets is kind of complicated, so it's best if you can take a few hours and go into the store.  The legs, drawers, self closers, and doors are all purchased separately.  The sizes on the cabinets are not exactly what I have, but you will get the idea. This list is so time consuming that I didn't add to it by measuring things too!

CABINETS
Hand sink cabinet (two doors)
Fondant cabinet. One long skinny drawer on top with two big drawers below
Cake box cabinet.  When we used this, we actually turned it upside down so we had a solid top.  Also we bought a bunch of extra shelves.
Hooks that hang on the shelves below and the wire shelves from Lowe's
Wall Shelves
Accessories for the shelves are plentiful  I like this box because it's great for storing washed icing tips and couplers.

LOWES
Wire shelves which we use in the pantry and for storage in the kitchen

We have made a much longer, more complete,  "sit on the floor and explain our organizing" kind of video.  If there is interest in seeing it, I will bribe Chaddy to get it ready.  Just leave us a comment if you want more!

Gumpaste Flowers... Buy or Make?

 Do you buy any of your gumpaste flowers?  Let me guess!  If you are a cake hobbyist, you make your flowers.  It's fun and challenging and your time does not equal money.  If you sell cakes professionally, I will guess that you buy at least some of your flowers.  Why would you not?  Are you some sort of flower purist? Do you think it's cheating? I made some beautiful ranunculus for a magazine shoot and they took me eight hours per flower! 

When I meet with a bride, I ask if they want flowers and then if they want fresh or sugar flowers (they don't know what gumpaste flowers are...yet).  They will often hesitate and I fill in with "I buy most of my flowers and they are often close in price to fresh flowers".  At that point, they are interested.  If I said the flowers would be three times more than fresh, I'd hear "I'll just use fresh".  There is a rare bride in Chattanooga that would not baulk at a handmade flower price, but as I said that is rare.  On some cakes, I really want to use gumpaste flowers so I will make it even more attractive, as in price.  I charge the cost of the flowers plus shipping and the time and supplies it takes me to paint them (if needed).  I include extra flowers in the price to allow for breakage.  If I have to buy a flower that I will never need the extra (5 for the cake and have 4 left) then they pay for the whole box because that is still fair.  If you book a cake in January with gumpaste peonies, order them then because they will be out of stock when you need them.  Just write on the box of flowers so you don't accidentally use them on another project.  We also will make extra petals to add some softness and fill in gaps between flowers. 

 

The flowers from the pictured cake were bought from Cal-Java and Wholesale Sugar Flowers.  The challenging part was that the cake was ivory/yellow because that is the color of my buttercream (with whitener added) and all the purchased flowers were bright white so they had to be painted.  Luckily, I could paint them with the airbrush so that cut down on my time. 

We entered a contest and won so our cake picture is one the front (and some inside) of the Wholesale Sugar Flowers catalog.  We really like their flowers and the prices! Please let us know how you sell your gumpaste flowers and if you make them, buy them or a mix of the two. 

Little Planes First Birthday Cake

It's great when you've created a wedding cake for a great couple and then get the privilege to make a cake for the next most important event. Jude's parents were wonderful enough to give me lots of freedom with the design.  These are always the best cakes I make, no debate.  I make them as big as I need to and spend all the time I want to just for the thrill of being creative. 

This is a buttercream cake that has three different colors of blue.  I used one of Wilton's icing combs for the texture on the top and bottom layers.  I really like the simple texture.  I made homemade marshmallows and piped them into cloud shapes.  I intended to put some clouds on skewers so that they could be coming out the side of the cake but they were too heavy and kept falling off the skewers.  It happens and that is the fun of learning and being self taught.  I like the large border on the middle tier (5 layers), smaller border on the smaller tier, and medium border on the top tier.  Just remember to keep things in scale.  Not everything has to be so "matchy-matchy". 

Lastly, I kinda stole for this cake.  There is a great site for cake decorating product but they are always out of the products I want, so I stole the shape.  I put a piece of parchment over a screen shot on my iPad.  I traced the item, and adjusted the size that I needed (used two different sizes).  I would have bought it, really.

We hope you can "steal" some inspiration from us too!  Happy caking!

A Groom's Cake Collection

What happens when a bride can't decide on ONE main thing for her Groom's special cake?  This cake happens!  We had two meetings, the second one solely to nail down only what HAD TO BE included on the groom's cake.  The only item we "lost" was changing a Lakers jersey to just using logos on the sides of the stage like cake.  Here is the list of items we had to include:

Accurate pair of Air Jordon tennis shoes in black, red or white

Air Jordon box for the shoes

Beats Audio head phones in black, red or white

Panda Express box with orange chicken

Panda Express box with Lo Mein

Pokémon ball

Lakers team name and the number 24

Guatemalan flag

Blue power ranger helmet

If you are a cake decorator, take a minute and figure out how many hours it would take you to decorate this cake from crumb coated cake to finished project.  I find it's easier to figure each element and then add it all up.  I'll tell you how long it took me at the end of the post.

Due to all of these items,  I was very worried that it was going to look terrible and like a big pile of stuff.  Luckily I was able to coordinate the colors so that helped the cohesion.  I originally planned on a 12 x 18" cake, but a 16" square base cake just looked better.  It was also supposed to be buttercream, but I added the fondant over it since everything else was covered.  We used modeling chocolate on the box because it just makes a sharper looking box.  The take out boxes and head phones were rice krispies treats.  The shoes were white chocolate pound cake.  The shoe box was pumpkin spice and 16" square  was chocolate (I think...it's been a few weeks).  She had a bit of trouble deciding on one flavor too :) 

We have talked about the takeout boxes and shoes in our previous two blog posts.  There isn't much exciting to say about the rest, I guess it's more about how it all plays together and how long it took to complete.  I've said before that I charge by the serving and then charge by the hour for extra artwork and supplies.  We aren't new or particularly slow at our job.  I am better at charging the right amount of artwork for a cake, but not this time.  We spent 44 hours decorating this cake.  I was tired for a week and mad at myself for bad planning for at least as long.  It is the nature of the beast and we have to learn more and do better with our skills in cake decorating and business.