Sunday, March 6, 2011

Trials and Tribulations of a Cake Designer: Transporting

Many will agree that one of the toughest and most stressful parts of running your own cake design business is the delivery. 

On the Food Network Challenges, the music cues and the dramatic sounds waves through the audience as the competitors are asked to move their cakes from their working station to the presentation table one meter in front of them.

Every week I deliver my creations all over the city. It would be typical for me to drive through over 7 stop signs, 25 traffic lights and an array of bad drivers before I arrive at my destination. Weather condition is another lemony snicket... sure, our 6 months of snowy road conditions and sporadic rainfalls don't help, but neither do those hot summer days when the temperature hits 30 degrees celsius and I have a butter based cake sitting in my back seat.

I remember one incident late last year when my girlfriend and I had to deliver a cake from downtown Toronto to Muskoka, about a two hour drive. When we hit Vaughan (about 30 minutes in), my breaks warning light went on (the image with the exclamation mark wrapped in parenthesis). Awesome. (Side note: it was pouring rain and I drive a rear-wheel car). But only a cake designer knows, there's never time to spare and delivering a wedding cake late was unthinkable, so we kept going.  Needless to say, the cake made it and so did we.

One thing I've learned is that it is very important that cake designers assemble a "cake kit" - like a first aid kit - filled with all the necessary tools you need to fix any damages during transportation. Sometimes I like to call my backseat a cake hospital. I've had to perform a few surgeries in my time but I'm happy to say we've had a zero percent  death rate.

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