Working at a Bakery is No "Piece of Cake"

My very first job wasn't really a job in the sense that the only payment I received for my work was lunch every afternoon. During my first year of college, I gained an interest in baking and sought to learn how to bake from scratch instead of using pre-packaged boxes. My dad knew the owner of La Baking Co. and I went in for an interview after a phone call. After the interview, I began the first day at work.

La Baking Co. is a two-story building located where the 5 freeway meets north Broadway. La Baking Co. has a fully functional cafe on the first floor and production on the second floor. I worked in the bakery as a server during the few hours of the morning and upstairs as a production worker the rest of the workday. There are five different stations on the production floor:

·       cake preparation

·       muffins

·       cupcakes

·       cake decoration

·       pastries

I rotated among the stations to gain a full understanding of how to make the different kinds of baked goods. Each station had between one and four people with one person being the manager of the station. All the workers on the production floor spoke only Spanish, which made things extremely difficult in the beginning because my Spanish wasn’t that great. I am a visual learner, which was beneficial because I could replicate the processes after observing someone else. By the end of the summer, I was more confident and proficient in my Spanish speaking skills.

Cake Preparation:

I labored at the Cake Preparation station the longest. Partly because the owner recognized I was very efficient with my work and partly because he wanted to make sure I was ready for the more important products. Cakes, the bakeries’ most popular product took a lot of work to prepare. Chuy, the manager of the cake prep station, oversaw training me. He first identified where the materials we needed were. After giving me a quick tour of the production floor we began the cake preparation.

Most of the work at this station involved preparing molds. Before we could prepare the molds, we had to place the molds on the work table, normally we would work on fifty to a hundred at a time. The process involved spraying the mold with non-stick spray, placement of a baking sheet, and then spraying non-stick spray once more. We prepared molds for various cake batters as well as cheesecakes. After the molds had been prepped, we would pour in the batter and place them on trays to be sent to the ovens. The cheesecakes required us to first place a layer of cookie crumbs on the bottom of the pan and smooth it with our hands before we could pour in the cheesecake batter. We would start the process all over again an hour later.

In between setting molds for the cakes and cupcakes we would prepare smaller baked goods:

·       small tarts (mixed fruit, blueberry, apple, and peach)

·       cookies (chocolate chip, sugar cookies, M&M’s, peanut butter, and oatmeal raisin)

·       mousses (strawberry, raspberry, coffee, mango, orange, chocolate, white chocolate, and coconut)

·       mini and normal sized pies (apple, peach, banana crème, pecan, strawberry, and pumpkin)

Around the afternoon, the preparation for baking would cease and we would begin working on the baked cakes. We first removed the cakes from their molds and evened out the top of the cake by cutting it off. Next, we would cut the cakes in half and would make sure the two halves were similar sizes and flat. We would then put them into a new mold starting with a layer of cake, add a layer of cream cheese frosting or whipped cream, if the cake had fruit inside we would add them, cover them with more whipped cream, and then finally place the top cake layer. The fully prepared cakes would be sent to the freezer to set before being decorated.

Cupcakes:

The cupcake and the cake decorating were my favorite stations. I enjoyed taking the cakes and pastries that the cake preparation team had prepared and creating something beautiful. At the cupcake station we worked on:

·       mousses

·       puff pastries

·       churros

·       decorating wholesale cakes

·       brownies

The work at this station simulated the work of an assembly line except the workers rotated around the workstation.

Occasionally, a customer would order mousse swans. To create the swans, we would cut teardrop-shaped pastries in half horizontally and then take the top part and cut that in half vertically. The top two parts would be the wings. We then take the bottom part of the pastry and pipe out a large oval shaped glob of mousse onto it. Next, we would take the wings and angle them a bit to overlap each other when they met at the back of the swan. Lastly, we would take a pre-made swan head that looked like an S and insert it into the mousse. I could imagine the customers having a hard time eating the pretty swans.

Cake Decoration:

I spent the least amount of time at the Cake Decorating station, but I enjoyed the time spent here the most. We usually decorated cakes to look like the catalog pictures but occasionally we would get a special order. We once got a special order for a wedding cake. They wanted blue and white fondant flowers to cascade down a white triple-tiered cake with some blue accents. The cake decorator, Arturo, had a hard making the initial design for the flowers. I had some experience working with clay and thought of a way to make them and then tried it out. My flower design became the standard and we immediately began making a hundred of them. I felt a sense of pride. Somewhere a newlywed couple had my flowers displayed on their wedding cake.

 

The bakery was an excellent experience. I remember departing the first day sore from standing throughout the day while continuously transporting extremely heavy cakes. It took a few weeks to adjust to the physical demand of the work. I miss working at the bakery. The workers were very kind to me as I was the only female upstairs and I learned so much from them. I’ve not baked anything since then. I haven’t had time to make things from scratch but I hope one day that I’ll get to use the skills and tricks I learned to make something wonderful.