December | 2011 | Sweet Heather Anne

Most of us (especially us single gals) are well aware that summer is the wedding season. Let me tell you, I have never been more aware until working on wedding cakes. We have way more business. On the flip side, the winter is slow… Very, very slow. Last winter, Taylor and I took an extended vacation while Heather worked herself silly (despite the business having less orders). This year we’ve decided to combat that by whatever means possible; Not just for the business, but also for Heather’s sanity.

Enter, the christmas cookie. We make a beautiful, mixed-dozen box of cookies that’s perfect for a small holiday gift. Rachel, our business manager, suggested we make sample cookie boxes for potential corporate clients in the Metro-Detroit area. It was a bit of a risk (making them was no small committment!), but within a few days we had several calls for some of the largest cookie orders we’ve ever taken.

Then it donned on us that we have to actually make the thousands of cookies and hundreds of cookie boxes. We like each product from our studio to be a unique work of art, so this is really no small task.

We’ve had to get pretty creative about tricking ourselves into doing all this work. One creatively fun way we got all the tags made was to throw ourselves a paper cutting party, or a cheese and ‘punch’ party, if you’ll go there with us.

We’ve also begun to acquire a team of loyal volunteers. Among them is our new intern, Ariana. She’s a student at U of M interested in pursuing baking. (She has a writing background, so we’re hoping to finagle her into blogging…)

Kristi, Heather’s long-term friend and fellow art-school grad, has been on-call for Heather since before there was a company. She’s incredibly meticulous and has a ton of paper cutting experience, so she kind of led the tag-making charge.

I spent a lot of the night eating cheese and taking photos (obviously very important– I am a blogger now, after all..) Rachel even made one of the cheeses! It was originally yogurt gone wrong, but what a tasty mistake!!

You might think (like me), who does that?! 1 – Who makes their own yogurt? 2 – Who would think to make the excess into cheese??? Well, the same person who has this menu on their wall…

And THIS AWESOME KITCHEN SETUP…

We couldn’t mention our fabulousvolunteers without giving a shout out to the Sweet Heather Anne Husbands Club. Well, there’s one husband – Drew. He’s great. (He’s done such essential tasks as fix the doorbell… woo hoo!)

Heather’s boyfriend, Antonio, has done countless hours of grunt work and cooked lunch for us probably a hundred times. He’s the hardest working un-employee ever, and we couldn’t do what we do (as well, at least) without him.