Whole Foods Market Bakehouse

What I gained from working at Whole Foods Market Madison's Bakehouse was the discovery that I have a knack for decorating cakes and pastries! Previous to working there, I had never even used a pastry bag! I was hired to start benching bread in October of 2007, when suddenly, the entire pastry staff quit all at the same time. That is another story. This is my story. When the bakery team leader put me on the schedule, I was scheduled as the opening pastry baker. I won't ever forget the smell of a cart full of freshly baked scones, croissants, puff pastries, danishes and cookies as I rolled them out to the floor every morning. After the morning bake was out by 8:00am, I would then start with the day's mixing. We mixed cranberrry, blueberry and almond scones, gingerbread cookies, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin bread and vegan scones and muffins in a large Hobart floor mixer, much like this one. Mixing is tedious and strenuous, as well as endless. Yet, the sweet smell of the fruits of my labor wafting from that cart every morning couldn't be beat!

After a few months of that, the team leader began scheduling me as a pastry runner. I started learning some of the dessert pastries:



Fruit tarts and cream cakes, ganache tarts, and parfaits. I also learned to make pastry cream from scratch, lemon curd, german chocolate cake filling, buttercream frosting, whipped cream and cream cheese frosting in a Hobart counter mixer like this one. As the pastry runner, it was my responsibility to, you guessed it, run pastries to the floor and stock the pastry case:

Pastry runners focus mostly on an additional case (not pictured here), of small portioned, packaged for grab and go, impulse buy items, and making the cake case look pretty. This is the position where the pressure of having to punch out high volume in a short period of time can be quite stressful. Yet, this part of the job taught me a lot about supply and demand at the ground level. Keeping in mind the shelf life of each item, environmental factors effecting customer count, holiday rushes, slow seasons, cost of ingredients, time spent on labor, retail price, sale items and storewide featured seasonal ingredients, meantime, being aware of health code, food quality and sanitation standards that WFM prides itself on, in addition to many other random factors, I learned to prioritize and manage my time wisely. Remember that not only was I working in a bakery, but a major grocery store. We were under pressure to put out literally hundreds of pastries a day as a pastry staff of 4 people on the busiest days, down to two on an average weekday. I recall one day when our bread-runner and counter opener both called in and I was already scheduled to do two positions that day: cakes and pastry running. I ended up jockeying all four of those positions for most of the day. That was a particularly challenging day. On regular days, all of the bakery production team was finished and gone by 2:30pm, so we also had to think about producing enough product and back stock for the rest of the day until the store closes at 10:00pm. Under normal circumstances the production schedule would be predetermined by a supervisor or team leader, but in our case, it was mainly up to us to decide since our supervisor often had different priorities and our team leader had many other administrative duties to attend to. I learned fast that working in pastry was not, by any means, a piece of cake.

My favorite position, of course, was cake decorating. I really enjoy being a cake architect! Thinking about frosting flavors and fillings, and getting to be creative makes a stressful job rewarding and fun. Our cake blanks were delivered frozen from the Whole Foods Midwest Distribution Center, so I didn't get to make cakes from scratch. (I experiment with that at home! More on that in other posts! (>.O) I wish I would have taken more pictures of the cakes I made, but if you look again at the three photos of the cake case above, you can see several of the things I worked on as a cake decorator, including carrot cakes, frosted in cream cheese frosting with toasted coconut and pecan pressed into the sides, and cute orange and green buttercream carrots on top, chocolate and vanilla carousel cakes with chocolate spires and buttercream rosettes to make them look ultra elegant, german chocolate cakes with in house filling and ganache accents, black forest cakes with cherry filing, vanilla buttercream and dark chocolate shavings, chocolate raspberry cakes with raspberry filling, buttercream frosting and a ganache coating topped with fresh raspberries, mocha cakes with coffee flavored ganache and chocolate covered espresso beans, lemon cakes with candied lemon slices, milk chocolate caramel cakes, and the list goes on!

The best parts about cake decorating were the special challenges, like the wedding cake you see below this post. Holiday cakes like these, were fun to embellish:

Valentine's Day. The odd shape was a step up from frosting round cakes, and it was my first attempt at roses!	Easter. The cake blanks were shaped like eggs. Boring. I made chicks and bunnies out of them.

Customers have very particular requests for special occasion cakes when it comes to the people they love!



It's always a challenge to try and fill a large space effectively! This cake was for an employee appreciation party for our store, which is located in Madison, the capitol of Wisconsin, otherwise known as "Mad Town" by its enduring inhabitants.

Top View:

Side View:

Aw! Look! You can see my tools on the decorating table! I never thought I would say that I missed standing behind that table while I was slaving away at it, but yeah, I do kinda miss it! Anyway, now I enjoy pastry making and cake decorating as a hobby, thanks to my experience working at Whole Foods Market Madison's Bakehouse. Andris, whom I met while working together with him in the bakery, and I, have just moved to Cincinnati and are currently in the planning stages on a bread and pastry bench for the new place! Keep an eye out for our creations in the next post!