Cheesecake Brownies
Plus why professional experience is a blessing not a curse
Hey my dudes!
Finally finally we have had a nice, normal, calm week at Bageriet Lördag. Nothing went wrong, no mistakes were made, it was smooth sailing all the way through. Honestly, thank god!
For those who are new here Bageriet Lördag is my one-day-a-week pop-up bakery that I run from my apartment. You can find info about here:
I said in last week’s newsletter that I wanted to continue my semi-impromptu series “Bageriet Lördag: Behind the Business”, in which I talk about all the unsexy behind-the-scenes stuff. The admin, the organization, etc. I get a lot of questions about running a bakery from home so I thought I’d use the newsletter as a way to answer some of them, occasionally.
If you’re here just for the recipe and not all the ranting and raving, you can find it at the bottom of the page :)
A question I often get in my comment sections is “how can I start a home bakery like yours?” I have been thinking about how to answer this type of question for months. I don’t want to squash anyone’s dreams or be a buzzkill. If you want to do it, go for it! More power to ya!
But in case you really want to know, here is how to start a bakery in your home.
The very first question you need to ask is “is this legal where I live?”. I cannot tell you that. What is allowed and what isn’t ranges not only from country to country but county to county and city to city. In my case I needed to talk to Stockholms kommun, basically the county. I applied, they sent an inspector to my home, she looked around and gave me the stamp of approval. I figured out how to do this with a combination of googling and calling. Google is free. Google is your friend. If you can’t figure it out by googling then you need to call. Sometimes you need to call several times to get to someone who knows something. This is how the government works. If calling your county seems too scary or too big of an hurdle then do not start a home bakery. You have much bigger obstacle in front of you.
So you have done your due diligence and you are legally allowed to sell food from your home. Great! You might be thinking that my next piece of advice would be on pricing or writing a menu or how to get your first customers. It is not. This is the part where I might be a little mean. But this needs to be said. If you want to start a home bakery (and, I cannot emphasize this enough, you are legally allowed to) then my question to you is: do you have professional bakery experience?
If the answer is no then (and this is just my opinion) abandon your home bakery plans and get yourself a job in a real bakery (or restaurant or cafe). If you have never worked professionally you are going to have a very steep, very rough learning curve to climb.
Baking professionally is not “can I bake a cake or a loaf of bread?” It is “can I make this cake or loaves this loaf of bread many many times over? And can I do that without losing quality or getting bored”.
If you are good and make tasty things then you will get more and more orders. Do you know how to organize a prep list? Do you know how to keep your station clean? Do you know how to make an oven schedule? Tetris a fridge?
Sure you can learn as you go but you know what is easier? Learning from someone who actually knows what they are doing. You are going to make mistakes. Lots of them. Do you know how to fix them? Do you have the faintest idea of what might be going wrong? Do you have anyone you can call to troubleshoot? You would if you had experience!
I worked for years in bakeries and restaurants in both California and Stockholm. I have worked in the best bakeries, in three Michelin star kitchens, I have been surrounded by the best of the best and have been very very good at my job. And yet!
And yet I make mistakes. All. The. Time. It is the nature of craft. To be human is to make mistakes. But, because I have a decade worth of experience, I can fix my problems. Or I can ask one of my pastry chef friends or my baker fiance. Having professional experience is not just about having connections and picking up a few good recipes. It is also about learning technique. It’s learning how to move. I can move fast because I have made so so many mistakes and have had to run to fix them. I can work fast because I have had a prep list a mile long and have somehow made it through. I can work fast because I have done the same motion over and over and over again until it is second nature and I can shave milliseconds off of each motion.
So to go into an environment (your home kitchen) where you have no help (no chef, no coworkers) and inferior equipment (once you work with professional grade fridges/freezers/ovens/proofers/sheeters/mixers it’s hard to go back) it is not easy. And then to top it all off you don’t know how to do anything? You can’t scale up a recipe? You’ve never had to work efficiently? You’ve never seen the 101 problems that can arise from even the most reliable of recipes?
I mean you do you but that just seems like a nightmare to me. And, also, can I just ask, if you have never worked as a professional baker before, how do you know that you’ll like it? You’re going to have to work so hard to set everything up, the recipes, the kitchen, the customer base, everything, and yet you don’t even know if you like working production? As I mentioned in the beginning, yeah it’s fun to make a cake or a loaf of bread but 20 cakes? 50 loves of bread? Is that still fun for you??
I mean, it is for me! I love baking. Actually I don’t. I don’t love it. Baking is, and has always been as far back as I can remember, such an integral part of my being that I simply cannot not bake. Every time I try to leave, find other hobbies, get another type of job, I simply cannot. I must bake. For others, for myself, all the time. It is simply who I am.
I am sure there will be a lot of bean soup in the comments about exactly why you simply cannot work in a professional bakery and for x, y, z reason must work out of your home. Cool! Whatever! Do what works for you! Go for it! I just think it would be way easier if you got a little bit of experience first.
If you have answered both questions in the affirmative, yes, you are legally allowed to sell food from your home, and yes, you do have some professional experience, now we are talking! Now we can get into the nitty gritty, the scheduling, the recipes, the customer base, the technique, the admin, all the little detail-y things that make running a small business so fun! But we will go over that stuff later! Because you can already get started now! You already have a base to begin with!
Tirade over, let’s move on to the recipe of the week: Cheesecake Brownies!
These are cocoa brownies, rich and dense. I often prefer a chocolate based brownie as they tend to be more intensely chocolatey but here I didn’t want the chocolate to overwhelm the cream cheese swirl. It’s already a more delicate flavor to pair with something as heavy hitting and intense as chocolate but I think by using a cocoa base instead, it balances well. The inspiration for these comes from Mark Bittman’s How to Make Everything. It is an excellent cookbook and I remember my dad making the cheesecake brownies from it when I was a kid and I just thought they were the best thing ever. I decided to re-invent the wheel a bit to suit my current tastes.
Xoxo,
Cecilia
