A Cake Decorator's Worst Nightmare

On Sunday I was scheduled to train a new cake decorator at the Bountiful Baskin. Justin came in the day before and gave me a key to the store, and then told me that the girl I was supposed to be training cancelled, so I was just going to be working there on my own.

The next morning, I get to the store and I realize that I have left the key to the Bountiful store at my store. So, I have to drive out to Salt Lake, get the key, and then come back. By then it is about 9:45. I go look to see if they have any cake orders and they have 8!! Two of the are due at 11 am, three more at 12, one at 1, one at 2, and one at 5. I go to pull out the ice cream to cut down for the first cake (A full and a third sheet cake) and they don't have the ice cream for it! I found a little partial of a tib though, so I ended up using the entire thing to make that one cake. My second cake order is an oreo on chocolate. They don't have ANY oreo ice cream OR any chocolate sheet cake. I ended up grabbing a 9" round chocolate cake, cutting it into a 1/3 sheet, getting a pre-packed quart of oreo ice cream and building the cake from that. Oh, and did I mention that they didn't have ANY deco vanilla?? I had to frost all of the cakes in regular vanilla ice cream instead.

Next are the noon orders. The first one is a 6" mint on chocolate. But again, they don't have ANY mint ice cream. Anywhere. No quarts, no tubs, nothing to serve to costumers, NOTHING! I did find one cake in the case that was mint on white, so I let the cake sit out for a little while, then I got a spatula and took the ice cream off the white cake and put it onto the chocolate cake. My next order was an oreo on white cake. At least they still had some white cake in stock, but again, I had to build the ice cream portion of it from a quart. The thrid one was actually a flavor that they had there already.

My ordders after that went a lot easier. There weren't as many to get done, and by then I had gotten a hold of Justin. He went to other stores, got the ice cream that bountiful was out of and brought it to me. I knew that he wasn't going to be able to get it to me before my orders were due, but the store was out, so I knew that they were going to need some later. He also brought me some deco vanilla that I could use on the remaining cakes, and a mint roll cake, since that was my last order and they didn't have anything to make those with either.

I actually calmed down a lot after Justin got there. I was trying really hard not to panic, and by the time he got there I was trying not to cry with frustration since they were out of almost EVERYTHING that I needed to use. I had to fill up all of their frosting bags, dye more colors, and find creative ways to make cake sout of things that they didn't have. When Justin got there, he took care of all of the opening stuff that I had missed in my frenze to get all my orders done on time. He also helped all of the costomers that came in, so that I could just focus on what I was doing. He was really mad that the store was out of so many things, and they hadn't done a very good job closing the store. It was really dirty, so he went through it, cleaned it up, and later talked to the manager about what she needed to fix with that store.

I am happy to say that even though I was extremely stressed out, I had all of my cake orders done on time and everyone liked them. Although, I have to admit, they weren't my best work. I was glad it all turned out okay. If someone had yelled at me, without knowing everything I had to go through to try and do their cakes, I probably would have lost it. Justin was really thankful. After he left he kept calling to check up on how things were going and to make sure that I was doing okay. He said that he was sorry that it happened to me, but he was glad that I was the one to take care of it because none of his other cake decorators would have been able to get all of that done.