I didn’t get to a Twiggs blog post last week as I just couldn’t find the time.  We had 9 weddings and about 25 other orders including Mother’s Day cakes so I was busting it to get everything done and delivered.  Overall, things went great and I was impressed with us!  The recession seems to have ended in a big way for San Diego or at least for us.  After what we and every food business went through a couple of years ago, I’m extremely grateful for the volume of business we have now.

I did a recent blog post about the “weekend of unusual wedding cakes.”  I could almost title this past weekend the “weekend of  minimalist wedding cakes.”  Almost every wedding had little to no design on the cake with fresh flowers being the main decoration.   Those are easy cakes for us to get done as the time spent frosting the cakes is minimal, which is the main reason we were able to do 9 weddings.  But we had a couple of unique cakes this weekend. 

Bernadette and Michael were having their reception at the Ultimate Skybox next to Petco Park.  I’ve written a blog post specifically about the Skybox as a venue;  it’s a great one (the venue, that is — not my blog post).  Bernadette had an inspiration picture of a cake that had an Eiffel Tower painted on the cake in a very rough, casual way.  I’m no painter, but I can certainly replicate that rough, quickly drawn feel.  It’s a little daunting to put brush to cake, as once it’s on, it’s on.  But it turned out pretty cool and was certainly unique.

Blake and Frankie got married at the Dana in Mission Beach — another great, contemporary venue.  Frankie’s a huge Los Angeles Dodgers fan, so Blake wanted to surprise him with some sort of Dodgers’ themed groom’s cake.  I gave her a few options  including a logo on top of a round cake and a 2-D Dodger jersey.  The most expensive option was a 3-D replica of Dodger stadium.  Blake immediately fell in love with that idea after seeing the Ohio State Stadium replica we did.  We had so many weddings booked for that day, I told Blake I needed to think about whether I could sign us up for that project.  After looking over the bookings and seeing how simple most of the cakes would be to decorate, my main assistant Emily and I agreed we could do it.  This was Emily’s project and she did a great job.   I talked to the coordinator and she reports that Blake was happy with the cake and Frankie was quite surprised.  It had to be a real conversation piece at the wedding.

This is another “drive by” post where I just show some cool cakes we’ve done in the last week and don’t really say a whole lot.  This post will feature a few kids cakes we did this past weekend.

First up is a Noah’s Ark for a baby shower.  It turned out super cute and the expecting parents were really happy with it.   Then there’s a two tiered cake with an elephant silhouette for a first birthday that the mom was quite specific about.  All the design elements were taken from the invitation to the birthday party.  I’m always a little leary of people who are extremely specific and detailed with their orders as I wonder if reality won’t match their vision and they’ll be disappointed.  But this mom was thrilled and said “it’s exactly what I had in mind!”  Whew!  Finally a simple, but cute, cake with featuring Elmo along with a little smash cake with Elmo on top as well. 

Thank goodness people love their kids.  I think the number of cakes we do would easily be cut in half if we didn’t have orders for kids’ cakes.  So the pictures are below.  Noah’s Ark is full size.  You can click on the other two to see bigger images.  As always, thanks for checking out the blog!

I worked for IBM for 9 years before saying “to hell with this” and going to cooking school to pursue my real passion.  When I was working at Big Blue, NO ONE left the company voluntarily.  People viewed IBM as a career and most everyone planned to stay there until they retired.  It was a bit of a shock when I began working in kitchens and saw how transient most food service employees are.  I remember at one of my first restaurant jobs a co-worker was complaining about the job and saying it was time to move on.  She said, “You know, I’ve been here for 9 months now and that’s a long time.”  I’ve come to see her attitude as a bit extreme, but still I now view years in food service as dog years compared to the corporate world.  Someone who works one year at the same restaurant is the equivalent of someone working for seven years at the same corporation in a white collar job.  Working for 3 years at the same restaurant = working for 21 years at the same corporation.  Staff changes are part of life in the food service world.  I’ve just adopted the attitude that life is change.  If you don’t like change, you don’t like life.  It can be frustrating when someone quits as it takes a while to train a new person.  But such is life in the food service world.

Shanna had worked for Twiggs for a year and a half (nearly 11 years in the real world!) and had become a very valuable member of our bakery staff.  She began as a novice who had a culinary degree and had made cakes from her home.  I’m a bit leary of hiring home bakers as working in a commercial kitchen is a completely different animal than working at home.  The main difference is the speed you need to work at in a commercial setting.  Even the most successful home bakers will have at most 3 cakes in one weekend.  Most have 1 to 2.  We’re fortunate that we’re very busy.  In a typical weekend we’ll have  3-6 wedding cakes and 20 or so other orders.  There’s basically four of us working on cakes and you really need to work at a quick pace to get everything done.  Shanna had evolved into a great baker who worked quickly.  But Shanna has a new family and working every weekend became a big problem for her.  So she’s off to another field to work Monday – Friday.  I’ll miss Shanna and wish her nothing but the best.

As fate would have it, Zach applied for a job with us right at the time Shanna was resigning.  There’s a synchronicity in this world that I’ve learned to pay attention to.  People submit applications to Twiggs all the time wanting to work in our bakery.  I decided I needed to pay particular attention to an application that just happened to come in right when we’re looking for someone — which isn’t that often.

Zach was another person who’d done cakes out of his home and his portfolio was very impressive.  So we welcomed Zach into the fold and he’s started off with a bang.  Below are three of the first cakes Zach has done for us.  There’s a train cake for a little guy named Ian who’s fascinated with trains and a Channel purse that came out great.  But the most impressive is a cake based on the movie “Scarface” which just was terrific.   The pictures are below.  You can click on the smaller ones to see a bigger image.

Shanna’s off to a new job.  Zach’s off to a great start with Twiggs.  Life goes on.

This will be a drive-by blog post just to satiate all you Twiggs Bakery blog readers — both of you!  We did a super cute 3-D cake replicating a child’s stuffed giraffe last weekend for some lucky 1 year old’s first birthday.  I doubt the birthday boy will remember the cake in the coming years, but first birthday parties aren’t really about the kid — they’re about the parents celebrating surviving a year of sleepless nights and dirty diapers.  This cake created quite a stir when it went out for it’s photo-op and presentation.  I was really happy with how it turned out.

And then we had a 2-D cake replicating a Jose Cuervos bottle.  This was actually for some guy in town for a convention.  I have no idea what he does, but his company must really like him as they ordered the cake for him.   Below are pics of both cakes.

     By far the most birthday cakes we do at Twiggs by age is for first birthdays.  Naturally parents are excited about their kid’s very first birthday.  I love doing kids’ cakes.  I love the whimsy and charm in them.  This past weekend Shanna worked on a cake for Lucas who was turning one.  Lucas was having a jungle themed party, so Shanna made a cake covered in jungle animals.  It was super cute and mom was thrilled.  She was nice enough to write a glowing yelp review, which we really appreciate.  As she put it, this cake took the cake!  I included pictures from every angle as you really have to see all four sides to fully appreciate the cake.

     At the other end of life’s spectrum, we also did a 90th birthday cake this past weekend.  Emily worked on this cake and it turned out fantastic.  It really looked like a grandma cake — and I mean that in the best possible way.  It was vintage and beautiful.

     The pictures are below.  Click on any image to see a larger version.

We do a lot of baby shower cakes here at Twiggs.  Either we’re getting more popular for baby shower cakes or there was something in the water in San Diego about 8 months ago because we’ve really been doing a lot of them lately.  I checked to remind myself when the massive power outage was that knocked out power to all of San Diego County, but that was in September.  So that doesn’t explain our mini baby boom right now.  But I expect a surge in baby shower orders in June — 8 months after the big outage.  Anyway, here are three of the six baby shower cakes we did this past weekend.  The first is a tiered cake with a baby carriage on top.  Next is a little baby bottom.  So many women find this cake adorable, but frankly I find it mildly disturbing.  It’s like the baby is buried in the cake.  But like the saying goes, “the customer is always right,” so I keep my mouth shut when someone wants this particular cake.  Finally there’s a simple cake welcoming Daniel to the world and his life.  We actually had a couple of cakes with this design this past weekend.  Maybe I should have included the other one because the woman who ordered it wrote a very nice review of the cake on yelp.  But I picked Daniel’s cake because I’m a Daniel, so I’m pro-Daniel.  This world needs more Daniels, so if you’re pregnant and haven’t decided on a name yet, why not give Daniel some thought?  You can click on any image to see a larger version.

This past weekend we did a groom’s cake for an Ohio State grad.  I’ve done an Ohio State “O” with buckeyes before as well as a Brutus Buckeye.  But this bride wanted a replica Ohio State’s famous horseshoe football stadium.  We ended up adding our own little touch of a scoreboard with Ohio State beating hated rival Michigan 24-0.  The cake turned out great.

I’ll post some more pics from this past weekend tomorrow, but for now, here are a couple of pics of cakes that were done while I was on vacation.  First is a 1920′s “Flapper” cake complete with tassles and feather headband.  That’s followed by a humorous cake kidding Diane on turning 65.  Click on either image to see a larger image.

This is another hodgepodge post about the most interesting cakes we did at Twiggs the previous weekend — this one the weekend right after Thanksgiving.

Paris was turning 13 and wanted a cute lion on top of her cake.  She was the rare kid who had a very clear vision for her cake and was very specific with what she wanted.  She e-mailed a picture of the cartoon lion she wanted brought to 3-D life.  We went through about 3 iterations of e-mailing a booking form and getting corrections before she was happy.  I thought the cake turned out great.

I got a call on Friday for a birthday cake to be picked up the next day.  Anne was turning 50 and they wanted two cakes in the shape of two fuzzy purple slippers.  That would have been fun, but we just can’t turn a sculpted cake like that around with 18 hours notice — especially with four wedding cakes and a host of other orders for the next day.  I said the only thing we could do on that timeline was a sheet cake with two fuzzy purple slippers on top, so they decided to go with that.  I was really happy with the result.

Finally we did a cake with Shamu on the top for Jacob and a cake with a sock monkey head on top.  Both were super cute. 

Pictures for all are below.  Click on any image to see a larger version.

We do more kid’s cakes than any other kind of specialty cakes here at Twiggs.  Thanks to the bakery, I’m kept up to date on all the latest cartoon interests of the under 6 crowd.   This past weekend, we did a cake for a cartoon I hadn’t heard of until we got the order.  Apparently it’s a fairly new cartoon called The Bubble Guppies.  While new to me, Alex who was turning 2 is a big fan so his parents wanted to get him a Bubble Guppie cake with all the characters. 

We do all these characters by hand from fondant so it can get pricey to get multiple characters.   Most parents balk when they get the initial quote for a cake with several characters on it and end up scaling back the decor to include the child’s one favorite character.   But Alex is an only child, so Dad was willing to splurge.  We ended up making all the characters.  It took Emily the better part of one day to make all the figures, but it just came out fantastic.  It’s really one of the cutest kid’s cakes we’ve done. 

So here it is. There are multiple pics — including two close-ups of individual Bubble Guppies.  There was just too much going on with this cake to appreciate it from one single shot / angle.   As always, click on each image to see a larger version if you want.

I’m still working out this blog thing, but this is getting to be a regular sort of post.  We do lots of interesting cakes for birthdays and other parties here at Twiggs.  Individually, it’s hard to come up with a whole blog post just about one cake.  But if you group them all together, then there’s enough for a decent post.  So here we are again.

 Amber was turning 23 and wanted a cake shaped like a Red Ciroc Bottle.  I’m a wine guy and really don’t know any specialty liquors, but Google Image Search is my friend.  As an aside, the internet and google image search has made responding to specialty cake requests WAY easier than it used to be.  20 years ago, I would have had to walk across the street to the liquor store to see if they carried Red Ciroc and then buy a bottle of it.  But back to Amber.  She had one of the top two reactions to seeing her cake that we’ve had this year.  She was thrilled and insisted on hugging Emily and giving her a very generous tip.

Lee’s Dad was turning 80 and is an avid golfer in his retirement.  So Lee wanted a cake that combined “80″ and his favorite pastime.

Finally, Riley was turning 1 and has a favorite rattle shaped like an octopus.  His mom wanted a Topsy Turvy cake with a replica of his rattle on top of the cake.  It was very cute and mom was happy.

So here they are.  Click on any image to see a larger version.