So, just wanted to share a bit about Valentine's Day.
You see... Valentine's Day is like the Olympics of bakery life. We spend all year talking about it, getting ready for it ('training', if you will), anticipating dreading it, and psyching ourselves up for several days of craziness.
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| We partnered with Yazel's Flowers & Gifts here in Lima and offered fresh roses at the bakery! |
Last year, I was completely blindsided by how busy we would be. We sold out of goodies (for the first time) by 10:30am! At one point during the day last year, we ran completely out of butter and powdered sugar. I might have found myself out back crying in the woods - no shame.
I had a much better plan in place this year, and things went sooo much more smoothly. We advance prepped like crazy and that helped so much! Little things - cutting out heart cookies, dicing strawberries, pureeing strawberries, and stocking the freezer with strawberry mousse frosting - saved us so much time.
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| Line outside the door at 8:40am... we open at 9am! |
Our best-selling product for Valentine's Day is the Chocolate-covered Strawberry cupcake. It's a fresh strawberry cupcake, topped with a strawberry mousse and then double-dipped in chocolate coating. It's a tricky one to crank out fast, because the mousse requires about 2 hours to make start-to-finish. The cupcakes also have to rest in the freezer for 20-30 minutes before you can dip them in the chocolate coating. I meant to keep track of how many of these we sold this year, but that stopped after February 2. I know we usually made at least 2 batches of 15-20 dozen each day the week leading up to Valentine's Day.
Our other NEW product this year was Chocolate-dipped Fresh Strawberries! I was able to get the fancy long stem strawberries from my supplier and they were SOOO good. We dipped them in Ghirardelli dark & white chocolate. Pretty sure I ate at least one per day during the ten days or so that we had them around.
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| IRRESISTIBLE |
As far as how the actual Valentine's Day ended up?! We cranked our ovens ALL DAY LONG and managed to keep a nice supply the ENTIRE day from 9am-7pm. Between Tuesday & Wednesday, we sold close to 7000 cupcakes, 2200+ cookies, 1500+ fresh-dipped strawberries, and 30+ cakes. Almost 1000 customers between the 2 days!
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| SO MANY HEART COOKIES! |
My team hustled their little booties off and worked so well together. So proud of them!
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| Even Ben got in on the action :-P |
However, by Thursday morning, we were all pretty much walking zombies. Valentine's recovery is a real thing. It has taken me until TODAY (5 days later) to feel halfway back to normal. And that's with a 2-hour nap Sunday and a 3-hour nap today. I also think being 23 weeks pregnant might have something to do with that.
So what's next for the bakery??! We've got our very own UNICORN DAY planned for this Friday. Unicorn goodies will be taking over our display.... and we are SO excited about it. Who doesn't love unicorns??!
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