Our gluten free Glens Falls Bakery is moving again. It is wonderful and amazing and overwhelming and more expensive than I would ever have wanted. When we moved to Glens Falls two years ago, we had a mission. We were going to market ourselves to the local bakeries and eateries and get the word out that we existed.
I remember being up very early one morning packing my room up watching the morning news hearing word of a virus in Wuhan China. White PPE dressed people were pictured everywhere. I remember it very well. It was November 2019. By Mid February, our family got hit with the worst cold we had ever had. I have had multiple lung infections in my life. Bronchitis, Pleurisy, Pneumonia. I am a veteran of severe lung issues.
Nothing like this though, the pressure on my chest was crushing my ability to breath and I knew it was not your average cold or flu. Nothing had ever come up on me like that before. I called the county to see if I could get a Covid test. I found out that I could not. There were no tests available and I was too sick to get myself anywhere that might have one available. It took 6 weeks for it to leave me. It took months more to recover.
September 2020, after a massive attempt to heal myself, the daily constant sweats finally stopped (i started drinking celery powder in distilled water) I began to be able to handle daily life again.
It was then that I figured we would just go head first into Glens Falls, pandemic or no pandemic and just start baking. We could do not call outs to businesses who did not want to entertain a sales pitch during the pandemic. We designed a large banner for our front porch, set up some guidelines and built an online bakery.
It has been working. It has really been working. I will admit that I wear alot of hats and I dropped the ball on marketing just to build the website and the product line. We had a good thanksgiving trade for being unknown with a small online presence (i somehow killed it when I set up the local google business and I hope I never make a change that jeopardizes that). It got pretty dead before Christmas, and then after the new year, we started to get calls for birthday cakes.
Our Team absolutely love making birthday cakes here. I always loved making cakes for the ones I loved, but this takes it to a whole new level. We get to bake cakes that just blow people away. They expect them to be like the other gluten free cakes that don’t taste quite right.
We love mixing and baking the cakes, we love creating amazing buttercreams and we love decorating them. When we got our first cake order, our little team was so nervous. We had never decorated a cake before. I had practiced a few basic roses, I was adequate. Sami had won the iced penmanship contest (YAY Sami!!) But we had never actually prepped one for an order.
We were proud and humbled at the same time. While we knew we had to get better at what we were doing, we were ecstatic that it was presentable and we could give it to the customer with a sense of accomplishment. As an aside, Carmen the customer called me a few weeks later to tell me that the 4 party goers (two of whom were gluten free) loved it so much that they sat around the table until they had finished that birthday cake. She thought since I was new to it all, I would probably need that information so that I had the courage to keep going on. She was right. I love Carmen.
We have worked up quite the business since that first cake. Donuts, biscotti, cookies, giant gourmet cookies, pies, muffins, specialty cakes, hard rolls, and lately, danish.
Is it any surprise we have out grown our kitchen. It is a good problem to have I am told. So in spring as the orders started growing, I began to get a constant gnawing feeling that we could not renew our lease here. The property does not allow a setup for people to come in, so we can never have anyone drop by.
More importantly, knew we would not have enough space or ovens for thanksgiving this year and we needed to begin looking for something more permanent that will take us where we need to go long term. I began looking at properties. Retail spaces with homes above them, Homes with zoning potential, and in june, i think I just started to look at anything at all.
Within that insanity, I had found a property in the first week that looked perfect. I cannot remember what the problem was at first, but there was an impediment of some kind, and so I went out and looked at other properties. In all honesty, I spent 5 weeks kissing frogs. Big warty smelly frogs. There was not much decent on the market, and I was starting to look at totally gutted places.
So, we are now in the process of closing (September 1). Prepping for a remodel and in general going a little crazy. In other words, we are moving again. Better location. Fantastic opportunities and we are putting in enough ovens to get through thanksgiving. I am building a wall of double ovens. We are putting in two sets of double ovens and leaving room for more long term in our gluten free glens falls bakery.
So, dear friends, we find ourselves having to pack up and move again. Reminds me of my father’s constant transfers and moving every 18-24 months. We have more notice, it is only 3 mile down the street, so it will be much easier on us.
But before all that happens, We have a dairy free double chocolate raspberry layer cake with chocolate buttercream. Its for Tina. We love birthday cakes!
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Great article