For a full year from around August 2009 to the fall of 2010, I made a lot of cupcakes and a lot of icing.
I’d go to the store and buy 4 pounds of butter at a time because good icing needs a lot of butter.
I also bought a lot of cookbooks because although I had baked cupcakes and made icings for years, it is one thing to whip up a batch for family and friends, and another to sell them.
Creating bakery-ready recipes was more complicated than I thought.
I would try a recipe idea – such as a small amount of cream cheese in the vanilla icing (along with butter) and like it – but maybe it was too tangy so then I would need to make another batch.
A real hardship.
I hired our Head Baker, Andrea, on a contract basis in the fall of 2010 and we met for a baking session in my kitchen one day to make all the recipes I had developed and see what the gaps were that Andrea would need to perfect or develop.
For example, we needed a carrot cake recipe and both the vanilla and the chocolate cake recipes needed work before and after we opened to make them consistently reliable in the commercial ovens. Here is the opening-day menu, quite close to today’s menu but with peppermint and peanut butter – and not yet featuring today’s popular Funfetti and Salted Caramel.
From Day 1, our customers have loved the icing we make- OMG people love Prairie Girl icings!!
And so, last night, in this Year of the Pandemic, we’ve finally launched a product that people have requested for years: jars of Prairie Girl Bakery icing.
You can eat it with a spoon watching American politics and no one will judge you.
One thing all businesses seem to be doing is “pivoting”. Catering firms that usually serve groups of 200 are doing take out meals for couples; private clubs known for wine tasting in their fancy salons are launching tastings via home deliveries and Zoom – in recent weeks, Andrew has even recruited a new BC senior leader to the bank never meeting in person.
It’s all a little crazy so in the midst of all this, jars and jars of icing is really quite normal.
You’ll find them here – and in our store – when all else fails, you can’t go wrong with icing.
