Home Wedding Cake Baker Vs. Commercial Store
My wife and I owned a successful full-service bakery in Cincinnati, Ohio many years ago. We mass produce cookies, cupcakes, coffee cakes, Danish pastries, donuts and even freshly baked breads. It was one of the last of the dying breed of old world style bakeries. And it’s a shame because now, bakeries specialize in only a few items and some only cakes. Now my question to you is this: Are home bakeries as good as commercial bakeries? Well let me give you some quick reasons why:
1) Cleaning. Let me just say that cleanliness depends on the person baking the cakes, not the location of the bakery. A meticulously clean person will be both in a business premises and in her home. I, for example, am obsessive-compulsive about the cleanliness of my work area and the cakes I make. But that’s the way I am, whether I make cakes in a shop or at home.
2) Quality. Anyone who does business in a commercial location has overhead costs to build business space and equipment. So naturally they try to save on costs of goods and ingredients. Home bakers have the advantage of not having this added expense. Also, they often limit the number of cakes so they can focus on quality. For my part, I am a fan of good taste and the best of the best ingredients. I know this sounds like a commercial, but it’s true. In our store our passion is to make our brides and their guests fall in love with our cake!
3) Focus. At home, bakers can focus on the business of baking and designing cakes. They don’t have any of the frills that come with running a commercial store. These things are not a distraction for the home baker. Since they limit the number of cakes they make in a given week, they tend to make their cakes by hand and forgo shortcuts that lend themselves to mass production. Our sugar flowers are so detailed you’d mistake them for a live one! But we can only spend this kind of time on details because we don’t mass produce.
So if you’re looking for a wedding cake, think twice before walking away from a baker who works out of his home. Feel free to interview them at home. Test your product and get a feel for your environment. Trust me when I say that our home bakery can rival any commercial store or grocery store that churns out wedding cakes, and I’m pretty sure we’d win big!
