GretaRodgersHawkenProjects2022

 For the last few days of our first week at Nothing Bundt Cakes, we continued working on different cake decorations, and we also began to learn more about interacting with customers. We worked closely with an employee named Hilary who is training to become the bakery manager of another location. She has baked, frosted, and worked in the front, so she has become a great resource and friend to us. She's helped us become more comfortable with the system they use, Toast, for transactions. We even practiced taking each other's orders to familiarize ourselves with the system. It has been incredibly insightful to see more into how the front and the back of the bakery work together. Since Hilary has experience with both, she has helped us learn what we can do to keep everything running smoothly. For example, if we sell a large cake from the case up front, we have to let the bakers and frosters know so that they can replace it. We've also become more comfortable navigating the baker...

  Our first few days at Nothing Bundt Cakes have been incredibly insightful into what it takes to run a bakery. The majority of our time has been spent making different cake decorations. It was surprising to me how many are handmade because I didn't realize how much time and effort went into the little things that are often times easy to forget. I had originally thought that many decorations came to the bakery already made, but I learned that not only do the employees have to assemble the decorations, but it is often something they do in between helping a rush of customers or bringing in a shipment of ingredients. While some of the decorations are a bit more tedious than others, assembling them allowed me to not only gain insight into this detail of running a bakery but also allowed our group time to chat with the employees.  They were very kind and shared different tips and tricks with us. Some of the decorations we made included cutting down small dowel rods and putting stic...

The biggest inspiration for this project was our love of baking and our desire to learn more about baking professionally. We also were very curious about the business side of running a bakery. Personally, I plan to continue developing my interest in business at college and beyond. I had previously felt like my love for baking and my interest in business had to be separate, however, I realized that this project gave me the perfect opportunity to combine a more practical interest with a lifelong hobby. We were incredibly excited to have the opportunity to work at Nothing Bundt Cakes because we had all tried their cakes and enjoyed them before. In addition, all of our pre-project communication with our mentor, Amber Hamilton, has shown us how much value we believe this experience will hold. Our initial hope for this project was to learn about both the baking and business sides of running a bakery, however, we knew that this might not be practical for a bakery who had already agreed to acc...