Christmas cake

Buche de Noel

Gingerbread

Peppermint cupcake

Modified schedule for Dec 22 to Jan 1

Fri 12/22 – OPEN 8am to 7pm

Sat 12/23 – OPEN ONLY FOR SPECIAL ORDER PICK-UPS so we can prepare Xmas orders

Sun 12/24 – OPEN 8am to 2pm

Mon 12/25 – CLOSED so our staff can recover from the holidays! to Mon 1/1

Tues 1/2 – Back to our usual schedule – OPEN 8am to 7pm

What’s Available at the Bakery Now

As we head into the holiday season, we are already stocking our cases with  lots of goodies, including jam thumbprints, pecan snowballs, Scottish shortbread, frosted sugar cookie bars, decorated Christmas cookies, chocolate cupcakes with peppermint buttercream, gingerbread boys and girls, and rum bites and cupcakes.

Pecan snowballs

Decorated cut-outs

Scottish shortbread

Rum bites

Christmas Orders!

We hope to accept Christmas orders through Sun 12/17, unless we reach capacity before then. I will post something at the top of our website if we close out orders before Sun 12/17.

All orders must be picked up no later than 2pm on Sun 12/24.

The specific items available for Christmas orders are listed below.

We hope you have a wonderful holiday!

Jenny

Christmas Goodies!

• buche de noel
• pumpkin roll (with or without toasted pecans)
• pecan pie (with or without bourbon)
• apple pie with streusel
• pumpkin pie
• dark chocolate cream pie
• key lime pie
• any of our cakes
• any of our smaller items, such as cookies and cupcakes, BUT ONLY IN BATCHES OF 12 OF A PARTICULAR FLAVOR/BAKED GOOD (or in batches of 24 if ordering mini cupcakes)

For the smaller items, if you would like a wider variety, please consider stopping by the bakery on Sun Dec 24 between 8am to 2pm. We will be fully stocked with our usual items and you will be able to pick and choose. We would suggest you come early though because we are likely to sell out quickly. Thanks!

As Doug and I were driving to the wedding of former JennyCakes employee Janine Joly, we started talking about all the great employees JennyCakes has had since it opened nearly 5 years ago. Doug thought we should have a section on the website that includes info on current staff as well as updates on where previous staff are now. I think this is a GREAT idea!

So below is part one of Meet the JennyCakes Staff (parts two and three to follow in the next two blog posts), but first I have to tell you about some new fun stuff at the bakery.

First, we’ve started making tiramisu!  It’s so much easier than I thought and I love the process of perfecting it so that the coffee, custard, whipped cream, alcohol and soaked lady fingers come together in such a way that I’m hoping you’ll have to say “oh my”!  We’ll be selling tiramisu in double helpings so think about it for Valentine’s Day!

Second, we’ve started making granola!  We’ll have two kinds: mine, which includes toasted pecans, dried cranberries, unsweetened coconut, maple syrup, honey, oatmeal, and Mary’s which includes almonds, coconut oil, sunflower seeds, oatmeal, dried cherries and honey.  For a while, we’ll be selling both in little bags ($1.50 each) with just 1 cup in them so you can try them out.  Later, we’ll be selling bigger bags of it.

Third, a few old things have come back, including Boston cream cake and cupcakes (made with the classic custard of egg yolks, fresh cream and butter in the middle and chocolate ganache on top), perennial favorite snickerdoodles, bran muffins with mixed dried fruit and toasted pecans, and triple threat chocolate cookies (yes, three kinds of chocolate!).

Come by and check out the new stuff!  See below for fun info about eight of our staff members!

Jenny

Bonnie!

Bonnie Lutz — Bonnie has been with us since Labor Day 2012!  I remember cornering her at Kenmont Pool, after observing her get-it-done skills at the snack bar, and asking if she would consider (oh please please) working at JennyCakes. We are so lucky to have her!  She’s the master of great customer service and efficiency.  She was sick one day and I had to fill her shoes.  I was so proud of myself when the entire cupcake case was nice and full and I could finally take a breath… until I realized she also handles all the cookies!  I have no idea how she does it all, but she does!  Little known fact about Bonnie:  her other job involves gardening!

Kristen!

Kristen Kellogg — Kristen is one of our amazing decorators.  She’s been at JennyCakes since July 2013 so, like Bonnie, she’s a long-timer!  Kristen has the gift of gab, which is especially appreciated when we bring new people in to check out the bakery and when we come in sleepy and non-communicative on Saturday mornings.  She brings to the bakery incredible exuberance, fierce opinions, and a scary amount of knowledge about Broadway musicals.  Amazingly gifted as a decorator, she’s done phenomenal designs from a wonderful depiction of Darth Vader fighting Elsa (yes, someone requested this!) to a huge variety of My Little Pony designs.  And if you really want to make her happy, ask her about the musical “Title of Show” (it’s her favorite).

Mary!

Mary Williams — One beautiful spring day last year, a woman named Mary came to us!  She has been a tremendous asset to the bakery.  She’s remarkably productive while somehow remaining kind, calm and compassionate (not something I accomplish very often — at least the calm part!).  She’s an avid Caps fan (yes, that’s the sport that allows hand to hand combat as a part of the game!) and knows everything you could want to know about CORSI, the most recent players brought up from or sent back to Hershey, which lines Trotz is running in the next game, etc.  Next time you come in, duck into the kitchen and see if a pretty woman with a high bun is at the mixers, and if she is, say “How ’bout those Caps?!?”

Ingrid!

Ingrid Ramos — Ingrid, our other gifted decorator, has worked at JennyCakes since December 2014.  Immediately, she jumped right in and sometimes it scares me how reliant we all are on her to know what’s happening at the bakery, where everything is, and how to do anything that needs to be done.  She does incredibly artistic and beautiful decorating, is super efficient, and has this wonderful aura of lightness and kindness that surrounds her.  She is the first to sense when someone is stressed or out of sorts (OK, that’s usually me) and figure out a way to help.  If you want to make Ingrid’s day, ask her how her new kitten is!

Karen and Abigail (Gali’s baby)

Karen Richardson — With us since September 2014, Karen has become the master of all cookies, bars and batters.  She is always eager to help me puzzle through ways to make the bakery run more smoothly.  Some of her favorite things are: daily walks with several long-time friends, visits to her sister in Boston, classic, jazz and blues music and old rock and roll, and sparring over politics with our wonderful former manager Gali Sapir.

Jim!

Jim Gordon — Yes, you’ve seen him making pizzas at Frankly Pizza as well but he ALSO likes (at least a bit) doing a weekly stint at JennyCakes.  He handles our inventory and runs the front counter on Saturday mornings with incredible calm and poise, as in I’ve never heard him speak above a whisper!  Rumor has it that he likes the Halo series of video games so ask him about that next time you come in on a Saturday morning!

Melanie!

Melanie Donohue — Melanie has been with us since the spring of last year.  She’s a local mom who works not only at JennyCakes but at Sage, a really cool store on Antique Row around the corner from us.  She brings with her lots of general baking knowledge and experience, as well as a very gentle and kind manner with other employees and customers alike.  Very fun thing: we’ve recently discovered she’s amazing at decorating cookies and cakes!

Tully!

Tully Hudson — We really lucked out on this hire! Not only does Tully have a wonderful manner with our customers at the front counter and a quickly-acquired acumen in the kitchen, but he’s done a great job of supervising the preparation of the hundreds of boxes the bakery goes through each week.. Extra bonus: he keeps us stocked in toffee at Christmas. Funny how an entire bakery staff can be so excited about toffee in the face of so many other available goodies!

Christmas cake

Buche de Noel

Gingerbread boys & girls

We have lots of goodies on-hand now at the bakery, including jam thumbprints, pecan snowballs, decorated Christmas cookies, chocolate cupcakes with peppermint buttercream, gingerbread boys and girls and, MY ABSOLUTE FAVORITE (I’m not even kidding), rum bites and rum cupcakes.

Our schedule for the week of Christmas:

Mon 12/19 – CLOSED

Tues 12/20 – OPEN

Wed 12/21 – OPEN

Thur 12/22 – OPEN 8am to noon so we can start preparing Christmas orders

Fri 12/23 – CLOSED so we can prepare Christmas orders

Sat 12/24 – OPEN 8am to 1pm

Rum bites

Thumbprints

Decorated cut-outs

We will accept as many orders for Christmas as we possibly can. I don’t think I’ll give a deadline because it always seems like we have to cut off orders earlier than whatever date I say. To make sure we’ll be able to complete your order, please submit it through the website sooner rather than later. I’ll post something across the top of the website and on facebook if we decide we can’t take any more orders.

All orders must be picked up no later than 1pm on Sat Dec 24.

Here is a list of baked goods that we will be offering for Christmas this year:

• ONLY IN BATCHES OF 12 OF A PARTICULAR FLAVOR/BAKED GOOD for any of our smaller items, such as cookies, bars, muffins and cupcakes. We’ve found it’s difficult to prepare variety packages when we’re doing such a large volume of orders. But we plan to have our cases fully stocked on Sat 12/24 so you should be able to pick and choose then. Come on the early side because we may sell out of some items quickly.
• buche de noel
• pecan pie (with or without bourbon but with a different, drier filling than we did for Thanksgiving because I think the pecan pie bar filling we used then was too moist for a pie crust — my apologies!)
• apple pie with streusel
• pumpkin pie
• dark chocolate cream pie
• pumpkin roll (with or without toasted pecans)
• any of our cakes, full size pies or full size quiches

We hope you have a wonderful holiday!

Jenny

Ovechkin scoring on Lundquist

Ah winter. As you likely know by now, winter is not my favorite time of year, but at least this year we can cheer on the Caps as they march through what so far has been their best season in years! Nothing is more fun than folding bakery boxes and watching the Caps score multiple goals on Henrik Lundqvist.

Here’s what’s new at JennyCakes:

Bran muffins with lots of dried mixed fruit and slivered almonds

Some healthy stuff!

We’re bringing back our healthy Bran Muffins with Lots of Dried Mixed Fruit and Slivered Almonds. Yes, I put all those words in there to make sure everyone knows they aren’t just boring old bran muffins.

Chocolate and vanilla vegan cupcakes

I also finally found a vanilla vegan cake/cupcake flavor that I like. It’s actually a brown sugar cupcake with whipped vanilla frosting that tastes remarkably like our regular buttercream. So now you vegan food lovers will have both the dark chocolate and the vanilla options available in cupcakes and frostings. Just think of the possible combinations!

We’re also trying to have on-hand in the case a wider variety of gluten-free cupcakes: chocolate and yellow cupcakes with chocolate, vanilla and strawberry buttercream, and upon special request, German chocolate frosting.

I’m still hunting for a tasty and attractive sugar-free option.  Send your recipes to jenny@jennycakesbakery.net. In the meantime, reduce your sugar intake by buying a whole cupcake but sharing it with three friends!

And NOW a few fun, not-so-healthy new things to help you conquer the winter doldrums.

Boston cream cupcakes

Soft sugar cookies with buttercream frosting

We have a new Boston cream cupcake. To maximize the fun of eating it, we take a lighter than usual yellow cupcake, cut it in half, put the bottom half in the bottom of a small plastic cup, cover it with a really decent amount of pastry cream (Yes real pastry cream! I figured out how to make it!), cover that with the other half of the cupcake and then drizzle it with a lot of thinned chocolate ganache (made with dark chocolate). Yum!

We also have new soft sugar cookies with buttercream frosting. We frost these with bright colored buttercream and then decorate them with bright sprinkles. But on a sort of blah Saturday afternoon last week, I frosted them with chocolate buttercream and they flew off the shelves!

Dark chocolate cream pie

Last thing — a dark chocolate cream pie. I searched forever for a recipe I liked. Finally found it right before Christmas. It’s creamy and VERY chocolatey. We sell it in the case as a mini pie, and by special order as a 9-inch. A good idea for when Valentine’s Day hits.

And speaking of Valentine’s Day, we’ll be sure to have on hand lots of 4-inch “sweetheart” cakes, chocolate goodies and cheerful cutout cookies.

And don’t forget St. Patrick’s Day and our Irish Kickers (chocolate cupcakes made with Guinness beer and frosted with buttercream flavored with Baileys Irish Cream and Jameson whiskey), as well as our Annual Cupcake Sale, which happens in March!

Jenny

So we’re changing a few things about how we do our Christmas special orders. The changes mostly involve scaling back a bit on the variety of things that we make. With these high-volume holidays, we’ve found it’s really hard to make so many different things while keeping our sanity and overall cheerfulness at the bakery! I hope you understand and won’t be too disappointed. We’ll still have lots of yummy stuff, I promise!

Frosted sugar cookie bars

We have a few new items for this Christmas season, including frosted sugar cookie bars with rainbow sprinkles, dark chocolate cream pie, holiday cookie platters (a variety of cookies on a pretty tray wrapped in cellophane secured with a ribbon), and holiday cookie goody bags (6 of our cookies in a clear cellophane bag with a pretty ribbon).

Returning goodies include pecan snowballs, jam thumbprints, shortbread cookies, gingerbread men, cut-out Xmas cookies, chocolate cupcakes with peppermint buttercream, buche de noel and rum cupcakes.

We’ve cycled out some of our fall specialties to make room for the new stuff but you’ll see them again next fall!

Christmas orders:

• How to place your order. Please place your Christmas orders online through our website. This is the best way we can keep track of them!
• When to place your order. We are accepting orders now and we will stop taking orders on Sat, Dec 19, BUT as we always say, we may need to stop accepting orders before then if the volume of orders becomes more than we can handle.
• When to pick up your order. All orders may be picked up on Thurs 12/24 between 8am and 1pm.

Baked goods available for Christmas orders:

• buche de noel
• apple pie with streusel
• pumpkin pie
• dark chocolate cream pie
• any of our cakes
• cookies (for a special order, please order at least 12 of a particular flavor)
• Christmas cupcakes — order cupcakes as usual but stick to chocolate or yellow cupcakes with chocolate, vanilla or peppermint buttercream and under Special Instructions mention you’d like Christmas sprinkles (for a special order, please order at least 12)

Here’s our schedule for this stretch of time:

Sun Dec 20 – closed as usual

Mon Dec 21 – closed as usual

Tues Dec 22 – open as usual 8am to 6pm

Weds Dec 23 – closed in order to BAKE

Thurs Dec 24 – open from 8am to 1pm for order pickups and walk-in traffic (we will have on-hand in the case Christmas cupcakes and cookies)

Fri Dec 25 through Fri Jan 1 – CLOSED

Sat Jan 2 – open from 8am to 6pm as usual

Have a wonderful holiday season!

Jenny