Bakeries & Specialty Cake

A bakery (also called baker's shop or bakehouse) is an establishment which produces or/and sells bread, pies, pastries, cakes & cupcakes, biscuits, cookies, muffins, rolls, pretzels, doughnuts, and other baked goods prepared by bakers. Many retail bakeries are also cafés, serving coffee and tea to customers who wish to enjoy the freshly baked goods on the bakery's premises.

A baker bakes and sells bread. Cakes and similar and foods may also be produced, as the traditional boundaries between what is produced by a baker as opposed to a pastry chef have blurred in recent decades. The place where a baker works is called a bakehouse, bakeshop, or bakery. Bakers make lots of varieties of food; bread, cake, donuts, brownies, fudge, and even more.

Today bakers work in varying environments both as employees and sometimes owning their own stores. Bakers can be found working in:

Large factories. These produce bread and related products which are then transported to numerous selling points throughout a region. These normally include supermarkets, convenience stores, and the like. Bakers in these environments are largely there for quality control as machines take care of much of the labour intensive aspect of the job.
Small Independent bakeries. These are largely family-run businesses. They may specialise in particular types of products, such as sourdough. Independent bakeries are much more likely to create products made from scratch on premises.
Chain stores. Recent years have seen the rise of chain stores (supermarkets) selling the same range of products. Bakers in these stores often bake according to a pre-determined recipe book. This can lead to frustration as some bakers do not agree with techniques used by the franchising model. However, the recipes used tend to be well-founded, and popular with the paying public. Alternately, many chain store bakeries no longer make any products from scratch, having switched to a more productive partially baked or pre-made format. This is a format that is popular yet not universal amongst American chains. This method also leads to frustration, albeit on behalf of the customers, who have negative connotations of pre-frozen or pre-made goods. It can be true that something is fresh baked on premises, but not fresh made. This should not be too surprising a fact, as supermarket bakery "departments" must produce large quantities of products which are generally inexpensive and therefore generally not very profitable to begin with. Even in this streamlined method of baking, the cost of labor can reach in the area of 20-30% of the bakery's profit and can keep a decently sized staff occupied the entire day. While it might sound hard to imagine, multitudes of these supermarket bakeries function daily without their bakers so much as touching flour, eggs, yeast or even a mixer. Products such as cakes, frosting, dough and sweet goods hold up extremely well in a frozen environment and can last for months in a freezer to be thawed and prepared for fresh consumption.

Cake is a form of food that is usually sweet and often baked. Cakes normally combine some kind of flour, a sweetening agent (commonly sugar), a binding agent (generally egg, though gluten or starch are often used by vegetarians and vegans), fats (usually butter, shortening, or margarine, although a fruit purée such as applesauce is sometimes substituted to avoid using fat), a liquid (milk, water or fruit juice), flavors and some form of leavening agent (such as yeast or baking powder), though many cakes lack these ingredients and instead rely on air bubbles in the dough to expand and cause the cake to rise. Cake is often frosted with buttercream or marzipan, and finished with piped borders and crystallized fruit.

Cake is often the dessert of choice for meals at ceremonial occasions, particularly weddings, anniversaries and birthdays. There are countless cake recipes; some are bread-like, some rich and elaborate and many are centuries old. Cake making is no longer a complicated procedure; while at one time considerable labor went into cake making (particularly the whisking of egg foams), baking equipment and directions have been simplified that even the most amateur cook may bake a cake.