TFB layer cakes

Dear Friends,

First of all we want to send a big thank you to those who signed up for our new subscription memberships last week. In April, we limited the offering while we worked out any bugs in the system. For those of you who signed up, the first boxes will be out tomorrow. If you're on our wait list, we should be able to accommodate you when we reopen subscriptions for May and thank you for your patience.

Now - I also have some exciting news about cakes, just in time for Easter weekend. But first a bit of context.

Sometime around 2016, we made the tough decision at TFB to simply do away with our fancy cake program. We kept the hyde park fudge cake, because, it's hyde park fudge. And on occasion we made our fluffy coconut cakes which were also quite popular. But there were some good reasons to cancel the rest of the program. We were very limited on refrigerated display space. But mostly, we were stuck in the informational dark ages using a desperately analogue system for keeping up with special orders.

For years, all we had was a stack of scratch paper next to the phone, and a set of clipboards - one for each day of the week - that hung on the wall immediately behind the retail area just to the right of the red swinging doors. These were hung by thumbtacks on drywall that could've used a coat of paint behind a waist high metro shelf, topped with a slab of 3/4" plywood. The plywood top was stained with years of overflow from the large double Fetco coffee brewer that sat on one end. The shelves under this plywood were a tangled mess of coffee beans, loose leaf teas, extra cups, cold brew equipment, a customer lost and found (but mostly lost). And the whole unit was massively heavy and lacked wheels. So anything that fell behind - say a clipboard with "Thursday" written across the top - entered a black hole from which it was unlikely to return.

In addition, if I took your order, my penmanship might tend to lead a well meaning baker astray. Paper order forms could and occasionally did slip off the clipboard descending into the great unknown behind the coffee maker. If someone took the "Friday" clipboard down and failed to return it… Well, you get the idea. Any of these unfortunate occurrences could decrease the odds of us successfully completing an order. It was not a good look.

Well they say recognizing you have a problem is half the battle, and by 2018 we had at least begun to computerize our special order system, though in practice, you still had to email us and one of us had to manually enter that into our bakery software.

But when the pandemic hit in 2020, we quickly turned our attention to what had previously been unthinkable, actual E-commerce - the kind that allows you to go to our website and place orders for our products in advance, with your order information traveling as if by magic to all the right folks at TFB. For me personally, it was a refreshing change in the way I spent my days as I no longer needed to call customers and apologize about how we’d lost track of their special order.

And so today, with our new advance order system performing flawlessly, our commissary bakery is ready to roll, and with us getting closer to a full staff - our newest announcement is that we are bringing our cake program back online.

For these spring holidays, I would suggest that you can't go wrong with our tried and true coconut cake - four layers of butter cake filled with pastry cream and coconut and coated with fluffy meringue icing. But we're also offering a lemon layer cake with buttercream icing and lemon curd filling that has been quite a hit with our stable of elite cake testers (that would be our friendly TFB managers, Carissa, and my mom).

You can see the full list and place your order on our website. We require a three day lead time on these cakes and we are still a bit limited in the total numbers that we can make, so if you want to order for this coming weekend and pick up at the trailer in the TFB garden, you'll need to place your order soon. The cut off for picking up a cake on Easter Sunday is Thursday.

Thanks again for all the love and support. We are very grateful. And may everyone eat cake.

bon appetit,
murph