Confession time! Between cupcake-specific baking blogs and wedding-centric ones, there are 272 blogs in my Google reader. My ‘new posts’ often exceeds 1000+. And I read these things almost every single day. That means I see a lot of wedding pictures. A LOT! I’ve noticed a couple things about the desserts after looking at hundreds (thousands?) of weddings: 1) Where are all these people getting sliced log cake stands? They’re everywhere! I fear we’ll soon be facing a shortage of 8″ – 10″ wide trees. 2) Pie is seriously trendy right now, so is croque en bouch. Yay for people thinkin’ outside the cake-box! 3) Time after time, when cupcakes are featured, they are so incredibly plain.
It’s that third point that I’m stuck on. It seems like the majority that I’ve seen have white or brown liners with basic swirls of frosting. WHY? Why have wedding cupcakes that look just like any other cupcake at any bakery? Everything for your wedding is customized to fit your style, so shouldn’t cupcakes be custom decorated, too?
There are about 57239590 products bakers can use to make cupcakes extra-special. Colored sugars, pearlized sugars, jimmies, nonpareils, quins, dragees, sixlets, edible glitter, pearls, candy beads, fondant, edible paper, isomalt crystals (edible diamonds), and almost every color liner imaginable. Many bakeries and cupcakeries are already doing a great job using this stuff (shout out to Crumbs and Doilies, who I can’t wait to visit next time I am in London), so why do I still see so many plain ol’ cupcakes?
Lisa and I don’t really do ‘plain’ in our own lives (ask me about my Bollywood-inspired living room!) and we certainly bring that to the business, so maybe we’re biased. But one of the reasons I love this job is that I get to be creative and design something both pretty and special, even personal, to the couple that’s getting married. So I wanted to feature one of our recent wedding towers to show how great personal design can be. It’s not plain, and maybe it’s not even elegant, but it’s as fun, colorful, and literary as the couple we made it for:
We’re raising our prices. There, we said it. We wanted to be honest and upfront about that because that’s how we run our business, with honesty. We kept our pricing the same throughout 2011, despite the fact that the cost of our supplies went up – some are almost double what they were in ’10 (Ghiradelli chocolate baking bars, we’re looking at you!). Gas prices went up, too. Overall, some news sources are estimating that cost of food+gas represents an 11% increase in expenditure this year. When you book weddings 6 months to a year in advance but don’t order supplies until days before, that’s an increase you can really feel.
The good news is that prices are supposed to steady in 2012. The bad news is that they’re not going down. So we’ve had to redesign our pricing for cupcakes, small cakes, and delivery. We’ve also had to add a set up charge for weddings because we found we were spending as much as two hours helping with set up (not just of cupcake displays – when we show up, we’re prepared to help with anything the wedding party needs) for about $5. Undervaluing our work isn’t good business.
We did a lot of research, a lot of math, and discussed every detail to arrive at pricing that we believe is both fair to our customers and doesn’t undervalue our product. We believe we provide the absolute best customer service and the tastiest cupcakes (our 5 star ratings back us up on that), but we know part of that great service is the feeling of value. So let us break it down for you:
- The average wedding cake for 120 people costs roughly $543.
- The average cost of cupcakes for 120 people is $434.
- Our cost, even after raising our price, is just $310.
You can add in a small cutting/anniversary cake, cupcake tower, delivery, and set up and we’ll still save you money – it’ll total only $408. We’ve also kept our pricing ala carte instead of creating pricing packages so that we can work with any budget. Because ultimately, what we want to do is give everyone the option of having a great tasting, beautiful, memorable dessert at their wedding (or commitment ceremony, bridal shower, baby shower, birthday, bar/bat mitzvah, holiday party, family dinner, etc).
So our prices may have gone up a bit, but it comes with a promise – we’ll never cut back on service, quality, or our commitment to our customers.
January 1st,2012
About us |
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Hello ladies and gents! The holidays are fast approaching – can you believe it? We just wanted to remind you that weddings are not our only bag, we would LOVE to do holiday orders for your family event, holiday
party, office potluck, church get together or any other occasion!
We’ll have special holiday flavors available – Harvest Pumpkin Spice, Swiss Hot Chocolate & Marshmallow, and Peppermint Mocha to name a few (more to come!) and as always we will custom decorate to your taste =) Head over to our order form and order up yours! 1 doz minimum, we’ll need 48 hrs to complete your order.
As a fairly new business, one thing Lisa and I have had to think really hard about is how we want to operate. What is the OLoC philosophy? Our mission statement? Our creed? We never could sum it up in just a couple words. When clients asked, we’d just tell them that we work hard to make our clients happy because it makes us happy – and yet, it goes even deeper than that.
Today we spotted a post on the (truly excellent) blog A Practical Wedding about the pledge that they have all their vendors sign before they can advertise on APW (and one they ask potential clients to take, as well). Though we don’t have an advertising budget yet, we’re proud to say that we already live by their pledge. It is reprinted below with a few additions specific to Our Lady in italics.
The APW Sanity / Our Lady of Cupcakes Pledge
- A wedding is an awesome party, but it’s the marriage that really matters.
- It takes two people to get married. It’s not all about the bride (and sometimes there isn’t a bride to begin with).
- We support LGBTQ couples’ right to marry, and we are delighted to work with them.
-We don’t charge a premium just because we heard the word “wedding.” (Note: Our pricing is the same regardless of event.)
- We will be upfront and fair about our pricing. We won’t surprise you with a secret fee because you want frosting on the cake, not just the cake. (Take a look!)
- You don’t have to have cake at your wedding.
- However you decided to tie the knot, we’re on your team.
- Weddings come in all different shapes/sizes/colors/budgets/etc., but as long as you two end up married to each other, it will have been a successful wedding.
- Our cupcakes will never be old, stale, frozen, or contain fillers like shortening.
- We will communicate with you in the most timely manner possible and answer all questions, no matter how silly or frantic.
- We respect all members of the wedding industry and will work with your other vendors (and maybe even send some leftover cupcakes their way).
- We will do everything within our power to make your experience easy, worry-free, and disaster-proof.
Not getting married? This pledge applies to you, too! It’s not just weddings we go out of our way for – it’s every client. Whether you order 1 dz or 25 dz, we want to make them perfect for you. It’s why we do what we do!
November 2nd,2011
About us |
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Well, it should be pretty obvious by now… we’re terrible at keeping the blog updated. But we have a really good excuse! Several, actually.
Since February, we’ve been really busy turning what started as a blog into an actual business. We’ve filled dozens of orders for office parties…
birthdays…
graduations…
bridal showers…
baby showers…
and the biggest of all: WEDDINGS!
Very exciting stuff!
In addition to the special event catering, which we love, the Lisa half of OLoC graduated with her Master’s degree AND started baking for Royal Coffee (http://www.royalcoffeebar.com/), where our cupcakes are featured along with cookies, scones (from KT’s mom’s secret recipe – the best ever!), biscotti, bars, pie and other sweet treats.
See? All perfectly reasonable excuses to slack a bit on the blogging. We really WANT to do more – put up a gallery page, tweet on a regular basis, streamline the site design, get a new logo, etc – but who can find the time between baking, our “real” jobs, our boyfriends (two of the most awesome guys on the planet), family, friends, and dogs… whew! Until we can make more time in our day, please check out our Flickr account to see pics of all the great stuff we’ve made lately!
Wow, we have been really busy! Between the orders, the holidays, and the many Capricorn birthdays, we’ve spent most of our free time baking up a storm. Last year, we did a lot of work on perfecting our cakes, fillings, and frosting. We’ll continue to expand our menu and hone our craft this year, but what we’re really excited to do is branch out into custom decorations.
Here’s a sample of the work we’ve done so far:
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| Dark Chocolate Orange cupcakes with custom paper corsets and Hazelnut Mocha cupcakes with dark/white chocolate corset designs. These were made for Allison's corset-themed birthday party. |
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| Dark Chocolate cupcakes with Peppermint Marshmallow frosting, covered in white chocolate and decorated with fondant and candies to look like snowmen. These were given to friends and co-workers as holiday gifts. Many thought they were too cute to eat! |
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| Dark Chocolate Peppermint and Lemon Tart cupcakes, in duo pack boxes with holiday decorations. These were given by one of our customers to her clients. |
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| These monkey cupcakes were made for a baby shower. We thought we'd never use the chocolate monkey mold again until... |
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| Someone else wanted sock monkey cupcakes for yet another baby shower! We also made cupcake toppers with sock monkey cut-outs. |
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| We made these heart-shaped valentines cakes just for fun, to see what we could do with our decorations. Cute! |
February 18th,2011
Cupcakes |
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Its one of our favorite movies. I watch it pretty much every time it comes on tv. So naturally when we decided to make a bacon french toast cupcake with maple buttercream, we thought The Breakfast Club was a perfect name for it. We started, of course, with this really awesome black forest bacon from Whole Foods (also lovingly referred to as Whole Paycheck).
This bacon is seriously delicious, omg. So we took this bacon and crumbled some into our french toast batter. We started with a basic yellow batter and added some cinnamon and a hint of maple – and it smelled just like french toast.
As those puppies baked up we worked on our maple buttercream. We had to experiment with this one a bit as we originally purchased maple extract to use, thinking it would be a stronger flavor than just maple syrup. Well, the flavor was strong, and also disgusting. Ew. So….no maple extract. We used a nice Vermont maple syrup, but next time I think we’ll need a darker, more intense syrup as this one was a bit light to be used for the buttercream.
We ended up cooking down the maple syrup a bit to concentrate the flavor and it worked well! It also caramelized a bit which gave it some depth, I appreciated that because this frosting was on the sweet side for me.
The cupcakes came out of the oven looking and smelling wonderful.
While there were no frosting shenanigans this time, I did get a little crazy with the maple syrup drizzle. It was more of a maple syrup flung about the kitchen….but they came out looking pretty, so the clean up was worth it!
And voila! Bacon French Toast cupcake with Maple Buttercream frosting, garnished with bacon bits and Vermont maple syrup AKA The Breakfast Club. Honestly, these were a bit on the sweet side for me. I also don’t like french toast (too eggy, though it always smells so good) so they weren’t my personal favorite to eat BUT we got rave reviews from lots of peeps, so they were, in fact, a success!
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Dear Mr. Vernon: We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But, we think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us: in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But, what we found out is that each one of us is: a brain . . . |
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And an athlete . . . |
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And a basket case . . . |
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A princess . . . |
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And a criminal. |
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Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, The Breakfast Club. |
