The VanWinkle

August 10th, 2010

Welcome the VanWinkle.

My favorite person in the world was my Nana, who we miss greatly since her passing.  She was no-nonsense, had a warm heart, and was the ear for all of the little old ladies where she lived.  Friend after friend stopped by when I was there to visit.  She was everyone’s confidant, liked to play cards, and had a bright red beetle-bug Volkswagen when I was little.

From time to time my mother would drop me off at my Nana’s house on VanWinkle Street in Dorchester, MA.  I would play in her pantry, stare at everything up high, and climb the shelves to reach things.  It was cool in there and I liked the smell of all of the packaged foods, especially the Pepperidge Farm cinnamon raisin bread.  I wonder to this day how much playing in that pantry had an influence on my becoming a chef.

Ultimately, we’d end up sitting at my grandparents’ kitchen table.  The tea kettle would be on for my Nana’s Cambridge Tea, and the dog Dutchie would click her way slowly in and out of the kitchen and down the hallway.  I would sit in that sun-filled kitchen with my legs dangling, looking into the driveway, with the glare of the sunlight gleaming off of that beetle bug.  I’d kick my legs back and forth, never sitting still, for what felt like hours.  And my Nana would sit with me and sip her tea and give me the dessert that would follow me through life as one of the most simple delicacies in the world:  fat, juicy blueberries (perfectly in season) in cream with a sprinkle of sugar.

So many of my recipes are inspired by the simple pleasures that I ate as a child.  But The VanWinkle is an homage directly to those “kitchen days” and memories of sights, sounds, and smells in my Nana’s apartment.

And so, let me introduce you to The VanWinkle.  It’s fourteen vanilla-bean sweet crepes stacked one on top of the other with alternating fillings of vanilla pastry cream and blueberry custard, made with fresh blueberries that I personally puree in my industrial kitchen.  The fruit is, well, 100% blueberries.  And as is the case with all of our cakes, it’s 100% all-natural.

And here’s an added interesting fact… this is the first and only cake so far that I put together and it just worked.  No tweaking.  Call it a kismet moment.  Or perhaps there is something to be said about the idea of someone watching over you.

We’re unleashing this cake this Wednesday, August 11th, in memory of my Nana, Bea Remillard.

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The Making of a Website

July 9th, 2010

I’ve developed internal-facing websites for almost 15 years, since before you could post a picture on the web, back in the days when Carnegie Mellon first had access to such cutting edge technology as showing text at something called a URL.  It’s almost comical to me 1) how fast and far the web has come, and 2) how old I feel now…

I have spent 15 years and what surmounts to almost an entire career creating the visual aspects of financial-based software for some of the largest banks in the industry.  While it was lucrative and oddly exciting to deal with live-streaming Bloomberg data, there is no doubt that it was dry.  Graphics: few to none.  Prose: not at all, unless you count for a help module.  Needless to say, there was no romance.

Fast-forward 15 years from my first ventures with the web to this very website.  Glory.  Romance.  A graceful dance, gently swaying to the finer things in life.  It was a pleasure to *finally*, after all of these years, photograph, write, and code my own website (with the added initial design of a dear illustrator friend of mine, Michelle Barbera, who created my logo and layed-out the homepage). I’ve been waiting all of this time to marry my skill-sets: the creative writing degree, the photography classes, the web-based development stuff, the chef degree, and the MBA. And in the end, what can feel better than marrying all of the non-linear, quirky pieces of oneself into something that can be shared with a little piece of the world?

This site took less than a week to develop with the aid of javascript libraries, various coding tools, a collection of great graphics, a friend’s graphical talents, a full business plan behind me (thank you to George Deriso and Liz Snowden at Leeds School of Business, and thank you to Denise Hallman and Kim West who were amazing partners in crime), and over a decade of playing with the evolving web.

End of the story: going live with this website was one of the greatest personal senses of accomplishment (that was years in the making).

Thank you to everyone for reading this, and for watching and supporting this business as we grow from tiny to small. Keep looking back here for slick web updates (as I have a bit of time here and there to improve your user experience); and of course, keep buying our crêpe cakes!

Cheers.
-kim.

Posted in web design | 167 Comments »

Crepe Dreams

March 9th, 2010

My little world is spinning.  I’ve finally hit saturation just a few days before a much needed vacation, my first real vacation in 2 years.

We walked into our industrial kitchen on Friday, March 5th, for the first time.  Of course the first day is really about setting things up and getting the lay of the land.  So, I didn’t really produce much of anything.  As an over-achiever, I have to admit that I was slightly disappointed.  But Sunday was much better.  I made enough crepes to make 4 large cakes and many small ones.  At this point it was really about experimenting with production, cake sizes, stream-lining the process.  I was starting to talk to myself after being in the kitchen several hours alone and was happily relieved when my kitchen-mate Josh of Shanti Bar walked in.  He brought music and steeped fresh figs with ginger and made a tea.  Sometimes it’s the simple pleasures that remind us that even a start-up venture needs to have a calming flow to it.  I tend to be very heads-down when I work, so the gentle reminders to have fun were greatly appreciated.

Nevertheless, things are quite busy.  One should never underestimate the amount of time if takes to be an MBA candidate while trying to start a business.  The MBA schedule is quite set, and it’s a weekly rhythm that feels normal after 2 years.  But the start-up requires some quick decisions that come about at completely unexpected times.  As I’m discovering, getting the chance to walk into certain Farmers’ Markets, when the deadlines have passed is not an easy thing… especially when you’re writing a ten page paper on entrepreneurship and are researching new niche markets for another class.  So far, there are very few things I’ve been able to put off, so the days are getting to be pretty long.

Meanwhile I dream at night about making crepes, about how to make the process faster so that I can produce more product.  I think about working through the night in industrial kitchen space to make 1000 crepes a week.  I crunch math in my dreams about the exact amount of time that would take with start-up and clean-up time.  And I wake up in a flurry of trying to remember if my mind was noodling on something useful.

But it seems that the moral of the story is that you know that life is very interesting when you’re eating dinner at 1:50 am.

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Social Media

February 24th, 2010

Whew.  I have been living social media for the last five days straight.  Over the past two days, creating a social media buzz has been my sole purpose.  And I just can’t believe how much time it takes… and I can’t believe how much it sucked me in!  I’ve been a UI developer since before the web was even out to the public (my Carnegie Mellon days, when an image took minutes to load), so I’ve been surrounded by the terms that are floating around: facebook, twitter, co-tweet, selective twitter, blogging, bit.ly, etc.  But actually getting all of it together and creating a presence across the big-name spaces was a bit daunting.  It took sixteen hours to create a face for The Crepe Cake Company website, twitter account, linkedIn account (my own personal linkedIn account too), facebook account, facebook company page, etc.  It is great now that everything is set up.  But, as a company owner and bootstrapping entrepreneur, it’ll be a challenge to keep up with it all.  I’m crossing my fingers… we’ll see.

The fact of the matter is that social media is a powerful tool to get the word out about The Crepe Cake Company, what we’re doing, where we’ll be, our big wins (and losses).  Basically, there’s nothing more important than being able to connect directly with our customers and get everyone’s feedback.  It’s actually relieving to realize that I’m not developing crepe cakes in a silo, that all of our friends, fans, and supporters can have immediate say in what we develop.

We’re launching on March 1st with two very well-defined and user-tested crepe cake flavors.

  • The Mexican Crepe Cake – cinnamon chocolate and dulce de leche
  • The Provence Crepe Cake – lemon and poppyseed

I’ve gotten a lot of feedback about making a ‘Smores Crepe Cake.  This would have graham crackers in the crepes and would be layered with marshmallow and milk chocolate.  What do you think?  Interested?

Cheers.

-kim.

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Posted in social media | 142 Comments »

Crepe Cakes

February 24th, 2010

Hello cyberspace.

Gosh.  I’m a software engineer and a user interface expert (at least that’s how I’ve funded my lifestyle to date) and I have a writing degree to-boot.  So, you’d think that by now I would’ve started a blog somewhere, about something… anything at all.  But in fact, this is my very first blog and my very first post.  So, what’s the catalyst?  Crepe cakes.

A few years ago I moved to Boulder, CO, from Boston, by way of Pittsburgh, Paris, D.C., Chicago.  I was in my early 30’s and was really in search of Life 2.0.  I’d been a software engineer, who [almost] survived the dot.com boom and bust, so I’d gone out and gotten “re-edumacated” and became a chef.  I guess my thinking was that it was pretty versatile to have a wide range of skills to weather a fallen sector by being able to delve into another sector that I’d been trained in… Writer/Creative –> UI guru/Technical –> Le Cordon Bleu Chef/Artist.  But then, somewhere in the swimming feeling of life in Chicago I started to wonder how I’d marry all of this stuff.  (And I missed things like climbing, hiking, skiing, and getting anywhere in a car faster than I could walk.)

September 2006.  This is the point where I got in my Wrangler with my husky-lab, Denali, and drove across the country to Boulder.  It was just he and I starting over (although I don’t think he knew it)… bright sunshine, hikes, fresh(er) air.  It was like inhaling into life again.

And the road wasn’t easy.  But it’s been amazing.  I mean truly amazing.

February 2007.  I picked through my brain.  And I hugged my dog.  Business School.  I had friends who were going-it-alone, who were freelancing and contracting and building successful businesses.  I’d always been self-directed, didn’t really need to be managed, kept bizarre hours that made corporate America feel sludge-like during the morning commute, and wouldn’t it be great to do something on my own.  I hopped into Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and go figure, got published in BusinessWeek for making an organic, chocolate cake as a creative challenge for admission.  Hmmm… maybe I was onto something.

I was burning the candle at both ends working full-time remotely from Boston while getting my MBA at night.  It was a happy-hour challenge to keep in touch with local friends while tagging phone calls from loyal friends back on the east coast.  I got busy.  But it was a busy that was truly enjoyable.  Somewhere in the midst of TV dropping off, and the dog getting fewer dog-park trips, I started making these cakes:  crepe cakes.  I really needed an outlet and had fallen in love with baking and pastry during chef-school.  And I liked the taste, texture, and consistency of these gourmet treats.  I started with a recipe from cooks.com, and I started tweaking it.  Over and over it got tweaked.  I brought it to parties.  And I got exceptional feedback.  Friends started inviting me to parties, asking me to make “those cakes”, the kind they’d never had before anywhere else.

They got carted around Boulder.  And I loved it.  I loved watching people’s reactions when they first tasted it.  I loved making them happy.  Women and chocolate, men and a sweet-tooth.

Biz School was a bunch of classes to slog-through in the beginning.  The impressive part was that I was assigned to an incredible team.  We worked well together.  That’s where my co-founder Denise came from.  After two years of working together at school, on everything from marketing to excel spreadsheets, we decided that we should start a company.  We were in a class for entrepreneurship, and we started talking about and trying out all kinds of ideas.  Most of them were technical.

And then something happened.

Denise and I had a meeting about our tech-start-up.  We’d been talking for a while.  Somewhere out of the blue I said that I should “just sell these crepe cakes”.  I’d made them the night before for a party, and they were on my brain.  Well, that meeting at The Cup was the moment in recent life where everything stopped, stood still, and immediately took a change in direction.  We instantly started talking about crepe cakes, and Denise simply said, “Let’s do it.”  There was no hesitation.  Turns out that her dream is to own a bakery, and I’m a chef who loves baking and pastry.  Go figure, the things you find out about people you’ve known a long time.

We incorporated The Crepe Cake Company on August 13th, 2009.  Then came months of R&D, business plans and competitions, getting cake into people’s mouths to see their reactions, and the plethora of people who have come on board to help with this little start-up.

So, what did I figure out?

  1. Well, I figured out how to marry writing, technology, usability, the food world, and an MBA:  start a business.  A really yummy business.
  2. I also learned that you can’t start anything in a silo.  At least, not if you want it to mean anything.  Hence, the power of having a co-founder.  Hence, starting this blog by reaching out to our community.  We all have a personal journey, but it’s amazing how collaborative that personal journey really is.  There are probably fifty people that will already go into the rolling credits of our start-up.  I meet them every day, and I hope I can bring as much to their experience as they bring to mine.
  3. Life is better if you don’t sit still.  Movies relax me, so I consume them regularly.  But the gratification is nothing like working countless hours to hear someone account to how they hoarded our cake and kept it to themselves to enjoy the very last bite.
  4. When you need it, it will be there.  Things come out of the wood-work, exactly at the moment when you couldn’t need them more.  When I hiked the Appalachian Trail, this was called “Trail Magic”.  From now on, I’ll call it “Crepe Cake Magic”.
  5. Have levity.  We’ve barely begun, and I already have some moments that are so hilarious it’s hard to believe they’re true.

So away we go, baby steps, to bring Crepe Cakes to your kitchen counter.

Welcome to The Crepe Cake Company!

Cheers.

-kim (CEO and Chef, The Crepe Cake Company)

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