Bear Bait or empty tray???

Today all I did was decorate, or “learn” to decorate. I use a variety of frostings… milk chocolate, french vanilla, ice glaze, butter cream, lemon, custard, raspberry, maple, german chocolate and caramel to name a few. I have trays of sprinkles, ,mini kisses, pecans, walnuts, almonds, coconut, red hots and candy. I apply the frosting with spatulas, spoons, my gloves, scary hard to use pastry bags with little widget tools at the end to make flowers and stars (or runny globs if you are me). There is even a teeny tiny air compressor at my station that attaches to fan to “spray paint” frosting onto cakes!! I am categorically not allowed to use this machine.  :)


I have learned how to make quite a variety donuts and pastries…I can fry, fill and decorate long johns, bismarks and dog bones. I make from scratch old fashioneds, donut holes and cake donuts. I make apple, cherry and blueberry fritters (hugely labor intensive!!) and put together my own caramel rolls. I can bake up light and fluffy croissants, turn overs and scones. Not bad for one week on duty!

However, I am  not GOOD at any of this yet. In fact my cherry fritters were SO dense, and SO big, that I had to fry them for some insanely long period of time to avoid runny raw centers and when they came out of the fryer, they seriously looked just like McDonald’s Angus burgers. If I had put them between two sesame seed buns – they would have flown off the shelves.

The most popular donut is frosted ring donuts (think glazed donuts with colored frosting). A close second is the filled long johns. Now THIS is right up my alley with the MORE is BETTER theme.

• First, we fry it.

• Then we fill it with FROSTING.

• Then we FROST it.

• Then we put sprinkles on it.

• Then we add buttercream FROSTING FLOWERS all over it.

• Then we drizzle MORE FROSTING on it.

Then we get a fork lift to move that sucker to the donut case.

Filled long johns are “heart attack” spelled backwards.

There is a system, a pattern to how we decorate. Each tray has a specific color pattern of decorated donuts and the bakery gals by now, know what sells. So they produce just the exact combos of donuts and pastries, decorated in the exact same way, laid out in the exact same order on the trays and put into the donut case in the exact same layout with a set schedule for weekdays and weekends.

We apparently do not deviate from this best selling paradigm for any reason. Ever.

Till today.

I’d like to say I was thinking outside the box when I decided to shake it up and do a full tray “freestyle”. But really I just forget what the heck I was supposed to do with this tray (after literally six straight hours of leaning over my station without so much as looking up. In fact by the end of the first 6 hours, my station looked like a full out crime scene. Frosting splatters, frosting globs, piles of sprinkles, frosting smears, nuts, grease, custard, lemon filling…it’s all everywhere…. It’s straight up gross! Frosting is all over my shoes, in my hair, on my glasses, coated on my no longer white hat and the floor is so greasy I have to toss towels down there to be able to stand without my feet literally sliding left and right. Good times!

Soooo, time is winding down but I still have to clean up my ginormous mess and then tray up for the next day (prepare 50+ trays to fry the next day – not counting all we will make from scratch in the AM), I just need to “get ‘er done” with the last few trays.

And I go crazy and break from the pattern! That’s right. I decorated a whole tray just using my OWN creativity. Now normally this would be okay – except I am um, not artistic. I can think of creative ideas – but there is a real and serious disconnect from my brain to my finger tips. Ask anyone who knows me. Not crafty.

As I suddenly started doing my own thing with these donuts – the Super Hard Worker Other Fryer and the Nicer Than Nice Bakery Manager just stopped dead in the their tracks. I stopped dead in mine. I was three donuts into a tray of 16 and I was doing my own thing!! Right there – just going all crazy and wild with the sprinkles and frosting.

“Oh, I’m sorry” I said, “Am I not allowed to do some different than the rest?”

“Well, you can, I mean there’s no rule, but that’s just not how we do it normally . But sure, go ahead and finish that tray” they said with limited enthusiasm.

So I did. Unfortunately I waited too long to get the sprinkles on and the frosting had hardened (we frost with warmed frosting). So I laid the donuts face down in the sprinkle bin to “force” those sprinkles to attach. Now I essentially just caused all the donuts to sink in the middle, now with a few hard to see sprinkles stuck to them. Hmm….how to fix…. So I fired up the drizzler. I drizzled so much frosting to cover the flat top with the non sticking sprinkles – that it looked like I attempted to FROST the donut with the drizzler. Soooo, I took the spatula and tried to SMEAR the drizzle around like frosting.

Yah.

No.

In the end, all I can say is you will sooo get your monies worth in toppings on that tray.

Now, in the morning (4:45AM), the first thing we do is take the donuts out of the case that did not sell the night before. We cannot donate these to the food shelf – they are stale by now. These donuts are picked up by “J”, who uses them apparently for bear bait. For real. Nothing is wasted!

So, as I write this it’s Saturday night. Sunday at 4:45AM I will enter the bakery and run to the case.

Will my outside the box tray of raised donuts STILL be there? Will ugly but creative donuts win out over safe but boring and predictable donuts?

Bear bait or empty tray???

Stay tuned…