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One of the best parts about owning the bakery is that I have the freedom to be creative.  I can collaborate with someone who needs a cake for a party they're throwing and they can give me the concept they're after and then I get to run with it.

Just the other day we got a phone call from someone who wanted to really WOW his girlfriend.  He told us this was his first time ever doing something like this and he had an idea in his head, but not all the details.  Basically what he wanted was a giant cupcake and then he wanted to incorporate the colors that are important to his girlfriend.

I wanted the cake to still look like a giant cupcake, since that was in fact what he wanted.  I didn't like the way the white cake board looked underneath the colorful cupcake and so I decided to cover it with red chocolate.  I think it looks fantastic!  After that I added some ribbon roses in the colors he requested and a banner wishing her a happy birthday.  I topped it off with a hand modeled "kiss". The cake turned out really colorful and fun, which I think was what he wanted.  When he picked the cake up from me he was thrilled.  I can only hope she was as thrilled as he was when he gave it to her!

-The Baker

 
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I've been MIA for a while, but it's not because I've been laying around watching the grass grow!  In fact, this is the busiest I've been in a looooong time.  I have been baking a bunch, but it's all been bakery related, and usually when I'm doing that stuff I'm under a time crunch at our bakery kitchen to get in and out, so I haven't been able to take lots of pictures like I usually do.  I'm going to make more of an effort to blog about the yummy stuff we're still making and eating at home, but until I do I thought it would be fun to tell you about the first bridal expo we participated in.

We were invited to participate in The Great Bridal Expo, at the Hyatt Regency O'hare, just outside of Chicago.  We accepted and then came to terms with the fact that we had no idea how to prepare for a bridal expo.  I brainstormed different things that I thought would be important to have and wrote list after list after list.  Then I convinced two friends to come help me out because no way was I going to do this myself!

To prepare for the expo I gathered lots of pictures of wedding cakes I've done over the years, prepared and had printed a mini-brochure to hand out, made several model cakes to have on display, made sure I had enough business cards and then baked and baked and baked because I needed 1000 samples.  I put each sample into a little lidded cup, and now that we've done the show I'm so glad I did!

When the doors opened we were surrounded by future brides and their grooms waiting for samples.  It was insane!  People were waiting in line for at least two hours to get a taste of our cake, and we weren't the only cake vendor there.  We just talked and handed out samples non-stop from noon until about 2:30, when the expo started the fashion show and we finally got a break.  One of my friends who was working with me had to leave at 1:00pm and even though she was standing two feet away from me I never even saw her leave!  We gave away every single sample and people were still coming back asking for more.  So many people came over to our booth to tell us how fantastic our cake was, and we could hear people as they were walking past our booth talking about how good it was.

All in all it was a great experience and we've had a lot of emails and phone calls from people who tasted our cake there and I'm pretty confident that we're going to be getting lots of orders.  We're going to participate in more expos and meets lot of new brides!

-The Baker