From Cake Lab

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Cake Lab 2.0 - ZacO Cakes in San Diego!

It's about time!
After working at Twiggs Bakery for two months, followed by six months at Sweet Cheeks Baking Company, I'm finally ready to branch off and bring Cake Lab to the West Coast.  
Is it a little bit scary?  Sure.  But it's been my dream to create my own cakes in a city like this ever since I discovered my passion.  Working for someone else will just never satisfy my creative juices.  
Yes, there will surely be crazy amounts of stress at times...but no risk = no reward!  Lots of people thought it was daring of me to move cross country to a city I had never been to and had no contacts.  Deep down I knew it was the right decision for me, and boy have I been lucky.  The strangers I moved in with from Craigslist couldn't have been better first roommates.  And I landed not one, but two full time cake jobs without ever taking a decorating class or attending culinary school (thank you to my friends and customers in Maine!!)I've also made a small but nice group of friends here and I can easily say I'm having some of the most fun of my life.  Being in a city with beautiful weather year round doesn't hurt either :)
I know it will take some time to pick up, but I know Cake Lab San Diego is going to bring awesome things to my life!  I could not be more excited.
I also have a new website that I'm still working on, but it's passable for now : www.cakelabsd.com 

Saturday, July 21, 2012

It's Been a While...

Today I decided to revisit my blog. Shocked to see I'm nearing 100,000 page views! Crazy to receive so much exposure for something that started out as a hobby. I took a look at some of my early posts after getting a little nostalgic. I realized I started this blog as a way to record my journey into the cake world, not just a place to show of my cakes. So it's time I update this blog on the past half year.
I arrived in San Diego like planned February 1st. On the 3rd I had an interview for a position at Sweet Cheeks Baking Company. I waited another week for interview #2, then another week to start a two week internship to test things out. Unfortunately...I didn't get the job. I was getting desperate. I applied to every cake company in San Diego and started looking for ANY type of work. I just needed some income. As luck would have it, a full time cake position opened up at Twiggs bakery about a week after I started looking for a new job. It felt serendipitous! When I went in for my trial day and was hired I was told part of the reason I was hired was due to the glowing recommendation from Elaine, one of the owners of Sweet Cheeks, who said she would have loved to hire me but didn't have a position available.
Working at Twiggs was my first time having an official job in a commercial kitchen. People say it's hard to adjust when you come from working in a home kitchen, but I feel like I adjusted pretty quickly. The hardest part was just becoming orientated with all the supplies and getting used to sharing a small space with others. I also had to work on my more basic skills like icing a cake smoothly in buttercream and piping on details.
About six weeks after working at Twiggs I was contacted by Sweet Cheeks again. They had a position available for me. Obviously I was in quite the dilemma. I just started working at Twiggs but there were many advantages to working at SC. First of all, it's just two minutes away from my apartment. The kitchen is large and spacious, and I click better with the other bakers/decorators. Not to mention the fact that they don't work weekends and they have a slightly higher standard of quality. I thought the decision was a no brainier, how could I say no? So I started working both jobs while I waited finish up my last two weeks at Twiggs. It sure was nice to get that first weekend off!! Definitely one I won't forget.
So now I'm working at Sweet Cheeks. Getting paid to make cakes. Is it everything I dreamed of? Well I guess not, but this was never my end goal. Now my main focus is on figuring out how I'm going to make my dream a reality. I've come a long way in the three years since I started decorating cakes as a hobby, but I'm still just beginning. Watch out!

I haven't made a whole ton of cakes at work that I'm truly proud of, but here is one of my favorite Sweet Cheeks cakes. Not what I would've done if it was a Cake Lab cake but it's still fun.

Angry Birds Cake