Every month we have a production meeting for the next month’s cakes.  We meet with Ron.  Who is the “We”?  Jeffrey, our head chef; Jason our production manager; Ron, we all know who he is and myself, operations etc.  During our production meeting we go over every aspect of our clients cakes with Ron – from flavor to décor to sugar flowers.  We talk about everything.  Once the meeting is over we all go our separate ways and figure out what needs to be done for the upcoming cakes.

After the meeting, our production manager Jason reads through all of his packing slips (that’s what we call our orders) and he starts to write a list of all the sugar flowers that need to be made and keeps it on the wall in the production room.  When the flowers are completed they are checked off the list. Jason also gives Ron his “Honey Do” list of Roses and other flowers that Ron makes to be completed.  We do this a few months ahead because of Ron’s schedule.

(For those of you that wondered if Ron ever “works” in the bakery – he does work with myself and production/bakery staff, he physically works on the cakes and he plays a major part of running his own company and knows everything that is going on with the bakery.  This is one of the reasons why I work here – he cares about his business.)

Two weeks before the cake needs to get done, Jason takes each packing slip and pulls the flowers out for the cake and puts them in a plastic box, the box is labeled and stacked on the shelf.  Once the cake is fondanted and stacked from the kitchen, it’s passed on to the production room to start the decorating process.  Depending on the design they have between 24-48 hours to complete each cake.   The cake then gets boxed up and put in the refrigerator and awaits delivery.

This kind of sounds like a simple process.  However, during the height of the wedding season we can have between 8-12 cakes a weekend.  So now we have to do this for every cake that is ordered and when you have 12 cakes in a weekend, it’s not so simple after all…