Baker’s dozen

A friend/coworker (note order of labels :)) and I were chatting about doom and gloom news and I thought I would share one of my favourite nice stories from the past.

I worked at a bakery for two summers before and after camp, and a couple of holiday seasons. 

This was not a chocolate eclairs and bagels type bakery; it was owned by a Swiss baker who locked up the booze and the good chocolate he imported from Switzerland, but who left the day’s cash receipts (often on the order of $5,000) in one of the ovens (the bakery’s closed now, so I am not revealing anything to criminals:)).  He would come out and yell at anyone who asked for a doughnut. And he charged $3 for a hand-dipped truffle (they were worth it).

I’d've asked for the doughnut, prior to working there. I learned a lot from him about tasting things. Also about craft and artistry, and how to mop a floor properly.

Even so, the first time I wrote out a receipt for a $1500 wedding cake I almost passed out.

So one busy Saturday I had a few people in line when a very disturbed looking guy wearing a t-shirt and tuxedo pants rushed in and paced until he was his turn.

“Do you do wedding cakes?” he asked.

“Yes we do.  You can look at this catalogue…”

“No!” he shouted.  I mean shouted. “I mean today!” I was a  bit floored and said, “Well -no, not unless it’s only for a few people and we can use one of these cakes…”

At this point the owner came in, possibly due to the shouting. And got to the point much faster. “What’s the problem?”

The best man, for so he was, explained that he had been in charge of one wedding detail for a wedding to take place that evening. Transporting the cake. In a minivan. And then he led the owner out to the minivan (I followed; I couldn’t help myself) to witness… the top layer of a large wedding cake which had had something fall over on it. (I never saw what.)

C., the owner, went to get the only other person working on the weekend, the kitchen clean-up boy, and the two of them hauled all the boxes of this now bedraggled wedding cake upstairs.  It was a frothy buttercream icing affair of the type that would never be allowed in our bakery.

And he instructed me to get the best man a coffee, and soon appeared with some of that precious locked up liquor to pour into it.  He asked the best man when the cake had to be there, and after some consultation on the bakery phone (this was the pre-cell era), figured out that he had two hours to work.

He rebuilt the cake. He couldn’t match the bottom layers for whatever reason (I suspect blatant snobbery) so he took all the icing off the whole thing, filled in the top layer with the closest cake we had ready, and redecorated the entire cake. Mostly with marzipan, which is – to put it mildly – not cheap. 

I’d seen C. work before but never on a wedding cake; he usually did those at home.  He never stopped moving, or I think, thinking. He never made a step wrong that I saw. He just put his head down and worked in that way people do when they have mastery. It took him exactly 1 hour 58 minutes.  It was beautiful – clean lines, and elegant, and the flowers trailing down over it the same shade as the ones that had come off the original cake.

And then he told the best man he’d follow him, in the bakery van, since it had all the right kind of shelving, etc., to carry cakes around.

The best man, who had not dared leave the store the whole time, put his hand to his wallet shakily (since he had by now seen that a chocolate truffle cost $2.50 in our store). “What do I owe you?” he said with that combination of relief and dread that comes of having a problem solved that Visa is going to have to cover.

“Nothing,” said C.  “But you owe me a dollar and forty-five cents for the coffee.”

When I was married a few years later, he made my cake too, a white chocolate mousse cake with marzipan roses. I had to pay a discounted price for it, though. But then, no one dropped it.