2 posts tagged “black”

The second wedding cake of the weekend was much bigger and was at a semi posh local hotel.  There were only 250 guests planned, but we made a total of 600 servings of cake for them.  The bride’s cake served 255 people, the groom’s cake another 100 or so and then they ordered 250 cupcakes on top of all that.  They packaged the cupcakes in delightful little boxes for the guests to take home with them.  What a lovely idea.  (Unless you are the poor schlep making 250 identical cupcakes!)

 

 

 

The Bride’s cake was a lovely red velvet cake, iced with butter cream and decorated in black colored chocolate swirls.  (Red velvet is a pain to ice, it keeps wanting to "bleed" crumbs into the icing!)  It was a striking look, the contrast of the colors was very pleasing.  I think it would have been a lovely presentation once they started cutting all that red cake!  I don’t like red velvet myself, I just feel like I’m doing something horrible to my body by eating that much food color (and it really takes a lot!) but there is no doubt that it is a pretty and delicious cake! 

 

 

 

 

I got all five tiers set in place and all the details finished and then looked around for the flowers for the top of the cake.  The florist had cut all the little orchids off the stem and my heart sank.  What a stupid move that was, but they clearly didn’t know any better.  So I started scouting the centerpieces on the tables to find stems of stuff that I could borrow for the top of the cake.  I snipped a few twigs here and there and combined with the orchid blossoms, it turned out very pretty.

 

 

  

The Groom’s cake was his frat emblem on a full sheet cake that was marble white/chocolate inside.  It turned out nicely I thought.

 

 

 

And then there were the cupcakes.  The Loser cupcakes.  At every turn we screwed up this order!

 

The first screw up happened when the elves took the order.  The client wanted an “L” on each cupcake, and the order said they needed to be made out of fondant.  BL told me to use a cookie cutter to make them and it wouldn’t be a big deal.  I took a look at that cookie cutter and I wondered to myself… it would look better for a child’s event than for a ritzy wedding, but I knew it was the only way to do 250 fondant “L’s” without wanting to jump from the nearest bridge.  (Doing a bunch of “L’s” out of Icing would have been quicker and easier but someone up-sold the client fondant – so that’s what I was stuck making.)  And with the amount of cake orders I had in addition to the weddings, I was about to pull out my hair anyway.  So I started in making these infernal “L’s.”  The bride’s mother happened by and BL picked up one of the “L’s” to go show her.  I was about half way through making them and I stopped BL by simply saying… “Don’t ask a question I don’t want the answer to!”  She looked a little surprised, looked at the fondant “L” in her hand and looked at me, realizing what I was saying.  She laughed, put down the “L” and went back to work laughing.  I made about 275 of those stupid things the first time around and had to come back and make more because they were fragile and I broke quite a few of them. 

 

 

 

 

Boss Lady is the baker and she just couldn’t keep up this week.  (For good reason – because the bread elf is gone and the brownie/cookie elf was on vacation.)  So I didn’t start seeing those cup cakes until it had already become crunch time.  They were red velvet cake in silver cupcake liners.  I had decorated the first batch and as I moved them some went flying off the board, like penguins into the ocean.  Those little silver liners are slippery!  I lost quite a few with that stupid human trick but it turned out that only one was beyond fixing.  So I used some non-slip stuff (the same stuff that they use under rugs to keep them from sliding around) and worked late into the night finishing up the first round of cupcakes.  But that was the beginning.

 

 

 

When one of the elves came in the next morning and looked at the cupcakes with all those little “L’s” on them… she dubbed them “the loser cupcakes” complete with full tilt New Yorker attitude and sign language.  The name stuck.  BL passed an edict that the client must NOT know that we named them thus, so the name really stuck. 

 

 

 

 

I was stressing because the rest of the cupcakes weren’t even baked and they are time consuming.  So she started the first batch but forgot to add in the rising agent and she didn’t figure it out until they were in the oven so the next batch of cupcakes didn’t rise.  They tasted a little strange and they were very short and dense.  She didn’t have much time to bake replacement cupcakes but she finally decided that she would at least try.  It turned out that we still had to use some of the red hocky puck cupcakes to finish out the 250, but at least they were finished.

 

 

 

The bride’s Mom and Dad came in to package up the cupcakes.  Each cupcake got the royal treatment in a red box with tissue paper and a ribbon with the bride and groom’s names on it.  Only the Bride’s Mom wasn’t crazy about my little cookie cutter “L’s.”  I didn’t blame her, I didn’t think much of them by that point myself.  But it was the morning of the wedding and there they were, all 250 of them.  BL scoured the order to see if anyone had written “cursive L” anywhere but there was nothing.  It was sad because making cursive “L’s” out of icing would have been so much easier for me.  The Bride’s dad just shook his head and told his wife “It is what it is” and everyone decided to be happy about it.  (He was a freakin genius!) 

 

They wanted to move the cart that I had put all the cupcakes on.  But then they realized that there was no way to get the cart through that part of the bakery, it would just be easier to move them tray by tray.  So the Bride’s mom picked up the one tray with the extras on it (that didn’t have the non-slip plastic on it) and I had to catch cupcakes like I was Michael Jordan.  Loser cupcakes just kept trying to jump. 

 

 

 

 

It is done and over.  I imagine that most of the cupcakes in their pretty boxes have been devoured.  It was a beautiful wedding and I’m certain that the new Mr. and Mrs. “L” are enjoying a lovely honeymoon somewhere marvelous.  On the other hand, I don’t want to see another red velvet cake for a very long time.  And 250 cupcakes?  Never again! 

 

And just for the record, it's the cupcakes that were losers, not the people.  The people were great.  And if you happen to know the lovely couple, remember that I was sworn to secrecy.  :)  (for all the good that did!)  LOL!

Well, I got out of bed this morning, and it was all down hill from there.  LOL!  No, it wasn’t that bad but I sure did get my fill of the obnoxious people at work today.  There was a moment that I felt myself teetering on the line, how I wanted to turn into crazy monster bitch and go off on someone.  But I controlled myself, dang it.

 

Apparently, what everyone seemed to know today (that I didn’t know) was that today is “whisper to your waitress day” and generally make it so I have to get in your face and ask “What?” four times!  And do you know the kind of faces that people make at a waitress who has just asked you your order for the fourth time and still can’t hear you?  SPEAK UP PEOPLE!  Unless you're not hungry, then keep on whispering and I'll bring you whatever I can't sell to someone who can speak.

 

Ok, I heard another server say this and it shocked me.  “Black people don’t tip.”  (jaw dropping)  I even asked her to repeat it because I was sure I heard her wrong.  (Did I mention that this idea did NOT originate with me?)  They get crappy service in my town because the restaurants all know they won’t tip.  What’s that about?  Do African-Americans tip where you are?  Or is that just here?  I’d never heard of that before but after some personal observation, I believe that it’s much more than just an ugly rumor.  So we had three black women apply for a job the other day, I wanted to ask them why they wanted to work for free.  But I didn’t.  But I wanted to.  They didn’t get hired.  Explain that to me, cause I don’t get it.  No, not the part about them not getting hired, the part about them not tipping.  And then a brown lady the other day ordered the thing that took longest to make on the menu and complained that other people (the white people) got their food first.  Um, let's think about that for a moment.  That one made Boss Man stutter. 

 

Secondly, students at the local college MARY BALDWIN do not tip either.  But we get college students from there who want to be hired.  Another restaurant manager friend told me that at her other job the servers will fight each other and refuse to serve the Mary Baldwin students when they show up.  I wouldn’t put up with that from my servers but I don’t want them working for free either.  I’ll wait on them myself so the girls don’t have to.  Now college students and pizza go together pretty well, but if you don’t have money for the food plus a respectful tip, then don’t go out to eat.  Maybe there should be a class on that in college, perhaps taught by Emily Post.

 

A young kid came in, maybe 15 years old and ordered all that he wanted to eat and I served him.  He came to the register with $10 and his bill was $14 something.  Now what would you do in that situation?  Send him to the back to wash dishes for the rest of the evening?  I didn’t need the dead weight in the dish room or I would have considered it.  I looked him directly in the eye and said “Don’t ever do that again.”  He looked a little stricken and left.  Maybe I was a little harsh, but eating your fill should be accompanied by checking the prices to make sure you have the money to pay for what you eat. 

 

Life in food service isn't confined just to annoying customers.  We got a new guy, only he isn’t a new guy – he used to work here before.  Ok, so he doesn’t like to be told how to do anything, because he already knows.  But he constantly proves to me that he doesn’t remember how to do his job.  His stock answer when I correct him is “Oh, that must have changed since I was here.”  (I doubt that) or else “Yeah, I know.”  (Ok, prove it.)  And yesterday I asked him if he got table one, and he said yes.  Which was weird, because table one didn’t have drinks.  And if a server has been to a table, drinks are the first thing that should be happening with that table.  I knew that table one had been seated for a while.  I asked about the drinks and he said “Oh, he said he didn’t want a drink.”  A little bit later I look over and table one is sporting drinks.  Hmmm, interesting.  I don’t mind a guy trying to cover his a$$ with me, what gets on my nerves about this guy the most is that he is a leaner.  He does a little something, then stops and leans a while.  I worked circles around him the other morning, watching as he did one thing to my four.  This isn’t rocket science people.  I’m not impressed, not one bit.  I went upstairs to Boss Lady and Boss Man to ask if I could send someone home (him) and Boss Lady explodes at me for interrupting, and then Boss Man comes downstairs to send him home.  Ok, whatever.  If you're so busy, then don’t come downstairs to send the kid home, I could have done that.  Remember the “big” bucks you pay me to manage these people?  Never mind.   

  

But today’s annoying batch of humans weren’t black or students, we just had our share of jerks today.  (Customers, not staff.) 

 

There was one group in particular, and we could see I was in for a treat from the get go.  They wanted to each place an order at the carry out bar but dine in, which we don’t do.  I finally got them all seated and one would not remove the cell phone from his ear and was completely checked out of what was happening except when the girl next to him would hit him and then he’d speak to me.  And I started to take their order, which they switched around on me repeatedly.  And they were pretty rude about it but I kept my cool.  The total for four people came to $68 which is pretty unusually high, but it was because they ordered small pizzas instead of slices or a pizza for the group.  One of the other managers happened to be there, so I went over the bill with her just to be sure it was perfect.  The other manager was running the cash register so the girl trotted herself up there, declared that she had worked there before and demanded the employee discount.  Oh, and she is friends with one of the staff.  The other manager is a very intense woman with hair that sticks straight up and she can be pretty full tilt in your face.  *please picture my delighted grin here.*  So she gave her the discount (are you kidding me!) and told her never ever again, and also mentioned that she got a sweet deal and that she HAD BETTER tip the waitress.  But if you could picture this small feisty in-your-face woman – she said it with her characteristic emphases.  The nasty little thing said she knew how to tip and walked away.  So on the table when they finally left was seven bucks, and at the girls place was a dime and a few pennies.  I asked the employee who she was “friends with” about her and he said she’d been fired to go to drug rehab.  When the bosses returned I told them about the situation and Boss Lady asked one question (Was she tall, skinny and blonde?) I said yes, and she knew immediately who it was.  That’s pretty bad.  So the award for the worst customer of the day goes to the crazy cell phone wielding table of druggies. 

 

Someone turned the pizza oven up to 750 degrees, and we didn’t catch it until the pizza started to smoke and we started wondering what was wrong.  It’s supposed to be at 500 degrees.  Thank God for high ceilings and fans!

 

I got a guy his slice of pepperoni in short order, and he told me he was starting to wonder if I’d made the pizza from scratch.  I think he thought he was being funny.  I didn’t.  No more beer for him.

 

Oh, and then there was the guy who liked to yell.  He came in, and tossed his stuff up on our counter.  Lots of stuff.  Then he hollered his order over the pizza bar at me so I brought him what he asked for.  A little later he paid in all quarters for the food and left, no tip.  He asked when the next pizzas would be out on the bar and I gave him a time estimate.  He was with this non-responsive guy who didn’t eat, just shuffled around.  Later he was back with the man in tow, hollering across the bar at another server.  They sat at one table, then moved to another.  We took him his food and he paid in quarters, again no tip.  He hollered something across the room at me once, I think it was “how you doin?”  Um, fine.  

 

I waited on a nicely dressed man the other day, nice suit and tie.  He was pleasant to me.  One of the girls refilled his drink I guess, she asked him if he was a lawyer.  He was really gruff with her and asked her why “the *#$& do you want to know?”  She said because he looked familiar.  He said yeah, he was.  Ok, so don’t bug the grumpy lawyer in the pretty suit. 

 

Then there is a man who comes in nearly every day that is creating a question mark in my mind.  He comes, sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend.  When he’s meeting someone he always shows up considerably earlier than they do.  He orders a variety of our gourmet pizzas, is always polite but not forward and when he’s with someone he can be funny.  He always sits at the same table facing the room, so it’s not uncommon for me to glance his way as I’m looking around at what the clients need.  He is often watching me.  He makes eye contact, but it’s not because he needs a refill or more pizza.  He’s just looking my way - rather often.  I took his money when he checked out the other day and he just looked at me and said nothing.  I walked away.  The name on his credit card receipt is James something.  It feels strange, not flirtatious exactly, he’s not smiling or winking.  Just watching.  What’s up with that?

 

And even though I had quite a few tables that didn’t tip at all today, I still made more money than usual.  Whew!  I guess it all evens out in the end.

 

Well, that’s the news from the pizza joint, where all the servers are strong, all the cooks are good looking and (most of) the pizza is above average.