Our friend Peter Phoa came to the bakery last week and took this photo of Andrew.
I love it.
Last week in this blog I suggested just doing the next obvious thing when you have a lot to do and let me say: this is a good strategy for opening a bakery. Really everywhere you look there is stuff to do. I’m sure in hindsight a lot of it will be wrong – like when we had the brainwave before we opened Prairie Girl that when we cashed out a customer, we would record every single flavour they selected.
Sure, yeah, there’s a good way to drive customers crazy as they are just trying to pay.
Anyway, here’s some of what we’ve done this week:
– Meet with Sunita from Sara Leah Interiors about the storefront a couple of times – loving the way it is coming together!!
– Make a batch of cupcakes in the kitchen! It is what Andrea would have called a baby-baby-baby batch (as in, just 2 dozen) but it felt good- I love the kitchen there!
– Review many applications for bakers and baker-trainees, hold Zoom calls with some, and then short observation shifts with a few.
– Place the grocery and equipment orders with the suppliers and get them delivered
– Unpack said deliveries
[sidebar: it appears highly probable that somewhere along the journey of recipe development, recipe scaling, planning for 2 weeks’ production and placing the orders, there “may” have been an error such that we ordered enough flour for 6 months. Or, maybe we just have flour for 2 weeks – but we have many, many bags of flour that as I write this, Andrew is schlepping downstairs in the bakery]
– Plan the first shifts with the bakers starting Thursday
– Work with Christina of Varro Creative on designing Coming Soon posters and email blasts, and making sure the website is good to go for whenever we actually have delicious baked goods (and puddings!) ready to sell online.
This time next week, I hope to share the news that we are baking in full force – or at least medium force.
“More anon”, as Marilyn’s British fiancée says.
Jean
