You may be asking yourself this very question, as it's been about a month since I last blogged. A lot has been going on, so I'll try to catch you up as succinctly as I can (although, if you know me at all, you know you're in for a long read).
In mid-July, I had a meeting with an inspector from the Allegheny County Health Department. We met at The Grand Residence, a retirement home in Upper St. Clair, as I'm going to start using their kitchen to bake when I have orders to fill. The meeting went well, and I received my permit in the mail last week. I think I'm going to go this week, maybe Friday night, and see what it's like to use their kitchen and their ovens to bake my weekly stash for the market. I'm hoping that it will save me some time, especially in the ovens, as they have a convection oven that will fit several batches of cookies, and that bakes faster than my oven does. But I have to try it to see. My bigger goal for having access to the commercial kitchen is to fill orders (especially for holidays and weddings), and perhaps even try to market to coffee shops and the like. We'll see how that goes. I need time to do that sort of thing, and I'm a little short on that at the moment.
Last week, my husband, daughter, and I traveled to York, Maine, for vacation. We had a lovely time, but I was shocked when we went into a pie bakery and discovered that they charge $32 for a 10" pie. While food in restaurants is slightly pricier up there, it's not THAT much more pricey than down here in the 'burgh. They said they make 50 pies a day. Maybe I'm doing something wrong. It's a good day when I can sell just one pie at the farmer's market.
Prior to vacation, I had to bake cookies for the two weddings I was doing. I baked for about 6 hours two nights in a row, and was able to knock it all out at that time. I had a few things that I had already baked and froze a couple of weeks prior to that, so that helped, as well as already having all of the dough made. I was mostly baking regular drop cookies, so it took a lot of scooping to make that much. My wrist was pretty sore by the end of the second day. But both weddings turned out lovely, and the cookies were a hit. I was invited to one of the weddings, so it was fun to be standing in line at the cookie table and overhear someone behind me tell the person they were with, "You HAVE to try the chocolate chip cookies. They're the best ever!"
We got home from vacation this past Friday evening, and we had the wedding on Saturday, and spent the night at my in-laws. This left me with little time to get cookies baked for yesterday's market, but I had already pre-made the dough, so all I had to do was bake it all. It still took time, but wasn't too bad.
Yesterday's market was a lot of fun. The weather was good—no rain, but it was pretty hot. At least the wind helped make it semi-comfortable. As I've said before, many of my customers are repeat customers, but there's nothing like a repeat customer that repeats in the same day! I had two of those yesterday, and that really makes me so thrilled!
So I'm thinking about expanding, but I'm not sure in what way. I may soon start to investigate doing online cookie sales—add an online order form to my Web site, and start to ship cookies to those that want to buy them but can't get to the market. If you know of anyone that would be interested in this, let me know. At some point, I'll start to advertise, which will probably include some direct email campaigns to get the word out.
Until next time, have a yummy day!
Read about the somewhat weekly happenings in the world of HappyJack Bakery, including how things go at the farmer's market each week throughout the summer.
