The CulinaryWoman Newsletter, 12/26/21

Growing a business in the pandemic

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Growing A Culinary Business In The Pandemic

One of the prettiest Christmas pastries is buche de Noel, or yule log. It’s a rolled cake, usually chocolate, but it can come in multiple flavors, that is frosted and decorated to look like a log.

In France, the patisseries go all out these days with elaborate and fanciful buche, which can cost $100 or more from the most-luxurious bakeries.

In Ann Arbor, I stopped by a pop up at Hyperion Coffee put on by Katie Robiinson of Botanical Bakeshop. This year, I’ve been spotting her vegan pastries and cookies around town, and I was intrigued that she was selling buche.

To my surprise — and needless to say, delight for her — the buche de Noel were sold out, snapped up in pre-orders. I had no idea that Ann Arbor had become so buche-focused, but I shouldn’t have been, since they are also produced by Zingerman’s Bakehouse, where Katie worked for seven years.

We got to chatting about her business. Katie, whose resume also includes making eye-catching wedding cakes for Sweet Heather Anne, a custom cake maker, bakes out of a commercial kitchen in Milan, Mich., a small town south of Ann Arbor.

Milan is becoming a center for local crafts people who are being priced out of our college community, and its commercial kitchen is one of several in our area.

Despite the pandemic, she told me 2021 was a banner year for her. Katie is active on a number of fronts: she sells monthly pastry subscription boxes, makes custom cakes, participates in pop ups, does catering, and her bakes are available through a number of retail outlets.

While everything is vegan, you don’t get any sense of “health food” about her products. Her chocolate chip cookies, made with almond flour, are just as delicious as anything made with eggs and butter.

Changing careers for culinary

Katie is just one of a number of women I’ve met during the pandemic who are nurturing successful culinary careers beyond traditional brick and mortar businesses.

Another is Julie Deck, the owner of Coo Moo Jams & Jellies in Brentwood, Calfornia. She is among the vast field of career changers who have found a home producing specialty foods.

Julie has a degree in criminal criminal justice from Western Michigan University, and for many years worked for companies that sold public records.

In the days before everything was available online, anyone looking for legal documents had to go to courthouses and purchase them on site, or buy them from companies that did document research.

Eventually, Julie started her own research company, focusing on courts in the San Francisco Bay area.

But as a foodie before the word was invented, she loved cooking and had regular conversations with chefs. That led her to her initial step into food, selling jam for four years at local farmer’s markets.

Ultimately, a friend convinced her to join her on a trip to Scotland, where Julie, like many of us, fell in love with the country, and especially with the Highland Coo Cows.

Knee surgery prompted her to think about focusing more time on the culinary world, and by November, 2019, she was ready to go into the jam and condiment business.

A friend designed a label depicting one of the shaggy cows, and Coo Moo was born — just in time for the pandemic to squash her ambitions.

“My goal was to get out to specialty stores, wineries” and other outlets, she says. But only four months after her launch, '“everything was shut down.”

A change in direction

Rather than rely on retail outlets, she shifted her focus to home deliveries. “I had to switch gears the way everyone else had to,” she says.

Luckily, her lineup of five products, focused on spicy fruit flavors like apricot habanero, struck local shoppers as intriguing. “The good thing was that everyone still wanted to eat jam,” she says. “People are looking for something like my stuff. They don’t see it on the shelves very much.”

Now, Julie’s business isells about $1,000 in products per month, primarily in California shops, and she hopes to double that in 2022 with the help of online business.

Despite her hopes for growth, Julie doesn’t see herself becoming a west coast version of American Spoon Foods from northern Michigan or Stonewall Kitchen of Maine.

“I can see one step, by one step, by one step,” she says. My goal is not to have a million products, just to have a few and really good ones.”

A Prize Drawing For CulinaryWoman Community Members

Julie has provided a gift package that I’m turning into the last prize of 2021 for our CulinaryWoman Community members. Paid subscribers and Founding Members are automatically entered.

If you’d like to join the pool, upgrade your free subscription to a monthly or annual paid subscription, or give a gift subscription to a family member. Thank you, Julie, for this fun box.

Our most recently prize winner, Henry Harteveldt, posted photos of his Peet’s gift box on Twitter. He brewed coffee and served it in a vintage TWA mug from his collection of aviation memorabilia.

If you win Julie’s gift box — or any of our giveaways — please post the results on social media and tag CulinaryWoman. We love seeing how you are using these gifts!

A Fabulous Dessert From My Culinary Mentor

A few years ago, Patricia Wells published My Master Recipes, 165 classics with many variations that she felt everyone would benefit from knowing how to cook.

One of them is her recipe for chocolate mousse. It is unusual from many mousse recipes, because it does not include egg yolks. She actually calls it “chocolate satin” and it is focused on firmly whipped meringue. It also does not include whipped cream on top.

“Never. Never. I just wouldn’t. I just wouldn’t. It’s so good on her own,” she told Epicurious. Instead, she puts cocoa nibs on top.

Try out Patricia’s recipe for chocolate satin, and the others in her book. I can tell you from experience that she is a wonderful teacher and her recipes will not steer you wrong.

Pop Culture That You May Have Enjoyed — Or Missed — In 2021

We heard so much about serious news stories this year that you might have paid less attention to what was happening in popular culture.

The Washington Post asked its columnists to name the films, music, books, art and games that we enjoyed this year.

I nominated Travels With My Father, the Netflix series featuring the Whitehall family — Jack, an millennial actor and standup comedian; his 80-something father Michael, a retired talent agent; his mother Hillary, a former actress, and Winston, a life-sized doll that the Whitehall men picked up during a trip to Thailand.

(I can’t explain Winston any better than that; you need to watch the show for the countless sight gags in which he is featured.)

Food and drink play a role in the series, although it’s far from a culinary show. Mainly, the Whitehalls gather for meals and bicker and reminisce and share insights.

Jack has become a rising star since the show began, with his own specials on Netflix, and he’s appeared in movies such as Disney’s Jungle Cruise and Clifford The Big Red Dog.

On my first viewing, I thought Jack was a brat, Michael much too profane, and Hillary rather zany.

But these programs grow on you, and you will learn something about each part of the world where the shows are filmed (by the end, the Whitehalls visited more than 30 countries). You also can watch them multiple times and catch new elements with each viewing.

So, if you need some laughs or a few eye rolls over the holidays, check them out.

Keeping Up With CulinaryWoman

Please follow me on Instagram @michelinemaynard and on Twitter and Tik Tok @culinarywoman. My email is culinarywoman at gmail dot com.

I hope you’ll have a healthy and safe remainder of 2021. Next week, I’ll be back with the first issue of 2022! Happy New Year and see you then.