Friday, July 3, 2015

Catering to special diets.

Here's the good news, we have finally nailed down a few vegan recipes, so we're able to make lemon cake, strawberry cake and a truly scrumptious chocolate cake.  We've found a frosting recipe that is almost as good as our buttercream.  This lovely 'exploding rose' cake had a vegan top tier for the groom.

We do use lots and lots of flour in our bakery, and our hazelnut almond cake is one of our most popular cakes, so I wanted to take a moment to point out what we can't do.

We are not a nut free bakery-so if you are deathly allergic to nuts, we are not the best choice.  We love Milli's sweets in Escondido.  We do generally avoid using peanuts, and we are extra careful about segregating those, since that is a common allergy.

We are also not a gluten free bakery, when we make most of our cakes on Wednesday the flour flies into the air, and quite often we come in on Thursday and it has only just started to settle.  This makes us nervous about serving celiac patients.  We do have some gluten free recipes if a small amount of cross-contamination is ok, but we always warn people of this.  We have heard that 2Good2Be in Encinitas is a fantastic gluten free bakery.

I also wanted to bring this up so that my customers could make an informed choice about where to buy their cakes.  If you have a severe allergy or intolerance, please consider asking whether these items are produced in a gluten free facility.

This is probably also a good time to remind customers that we don't make sugar free cakes.  We have a couple of recipes that don't spike your blood sugar as much, a wholemeal honey apple cake, and we can cut back the sugar on our orange almond cake, but we don't like using artificial sweeteners.

Do you have any favorite gluten free or nut free bakeries we can refer people to?


Thursday, July 2, 2015

Carousel first birthday party!

We were recently invited to create lots of fun desserts and cakes for a very special birthday boy.  The event took place at a lovely local resort, the Lakehouse Hotel and Resort, a new venue to us, and a lovely place for a small party with a view of San Marcos Lake.

Ariane had some amazing ideas with a carousel theme.  We created a 3 tiered cake with carousel horses, cupcakes with gold horse toppers, cake pops with custom created sticks, and cute cupcake/cake pop combos with fun paper horses to decorate.  We included blue vanilla bean macarons with chocolate ganache, and cinnamon macarons with dulce de leche

The whole place was decorated with a lovely sparkly gold, red and blue color scheme.

We also made a small cake for Ariane since she was celebrating her birthday too!