SaiDulamHawkenProjects2022

  For my senior project, I decided to dive deeper into one of my passions. I chose baking because it has become a huge part of my life and has allowed me to get my mind off when school or extracurricular activities have become stressful. Overall, I think that my project went quite well. Even though it was not exactly what I had expected, I have been able to take away many valuable lessons. Originally going into this project, I thought the project would be more focused on the baking aspect and learning different pastry techniques. However, the project became much more than just baking. I was able to learn a lot about marketing strategies and the business-related aspects of running a franchise. I have also been able to learn about customer service and customer satisfaction. I feel as though I was quite engaged because we were doing different things every day and meeting different people every day. Every time I walked into the bakery, I was excited as to what was to come of the day. O...

  We spent a lot of this week shadowing our mentor, Amber Hamilton. Amber is the general manager for the South Euclid location and she oversees all of the managerial duties for this bakery. She is also quite responsible for the marketing aspect of the bakery and she helps out wherever it is necessary. While she takes many business calls and is meetings with corporate, she also helps out with the baking, frosting, and crafting. While Amber is currently the South Euclid manager, she is soon going to be promoted to a higher position where she will be overseeing multiple Nothing Bundt Cake locations in the Cleveland area. As a result, she has been conducting interviews for potential candidates that would be replacing her for the Nothing Bundt Cakes South Euclid location. She also has a role in looking over employee applications and hiring possible candidates. It was actually really interesting because she was telling us about an employee application from a Hawken student that she had! ...

  As I mentioned in one of my earlier blogs, a big message that the bakery spreads is the importance of adding sweetness to another person’s life. Over these past few weeks is that Nothing Bundt Cakes is more than just cakes. Many people come into the store for several different reasons. We have customers shopping for birthday cakes, wedding cakes, graduation cakes, get-well-soon cakes, appreciation cakes, job promotion cakes, and the list goes on. Every cake tells a different story and has a different purpose. I have learned that Nothing Bundt Cakes tries to market this idea of bringing people together in order to sell their cakes. I can truly say that this strategy works. They send out multiple emails about special occasions and holidays to show several different designs that they have planned for each upcoming event. In the last two weeks, they have been busy advertising for nurse appreciation week and teacher appreciation week. More recently, we have been working on graduation ...

  During the second week, we worked partially in the front again because the bakery was short-staffed with students still in school and covid/sicknesses. We continued learning how to make sure customers were satisfied and always left happier than before they came in. This week we were much more independent in terms of working the cashier. The three of us were typically the only ones in the front for part of this week. While we were able to quickly grasp how to use the toast pos system, we still were not experts at it. That’s when we discovered a button that we could press to call for help from the back. Throughout working at the bakery so far, we learned how necessary it is to ask for help when needed. Often times when we tried to resolve an issue on our own or figure out how to use the system by ourselves, it took much longer and caused confusion. We quickly learned that if we asked for help, everyone was willing to help us and teach us something new. We also discovered how big of...

  This week we started to work in the back of the bakery. I typically bake in my home during my free time. However, baking in a bakery was a much different experience than just doing so at home. On the first day, I learned how to make the featured flavor, which is blueberry bliss right now. I was able to see all the recipes that they follow in the back and the baking methods you need to follow. The first thing I had to do was look at the paper that listed how many of each size of the flavor we had to make. For instance, we had to make 9 pans of bundtlets, 15 pans of 8-inch cakes, and 14 pans of 10-inch cakes. After we gathered all of the pans, we started to spray them with non-stick spray. Once the pans were sprayed, I learned how to scoop the pre-made batter into the different-sized pans. The baker I was working with showed me this technique where I had to start the scoop from the middle and pull it up to the side where I had to level it out so that all the scoops and cakes were t...