I’m Emily, and I love baking! However, due to being far to good at finishing off anything that I make, I am also on a diet. Hence I had to stop baking, unless I have to give it away.
It helps that I work in a cafe, I do bake there a minimum of once a fortnight. However, there isn’t a great deal of variety… I can make several varieties of crumble from memory.
The cafe is attached to a shop, and the staff from the shop come up for lunch every weekday. They will usually take their food to the staff room, because there usually isn’t room for them to sit in the cafe, but they frequently forget to bring the crockery and cutlery back to the cafe. This has led to me making several back-breaking trips back to the cafe with trays piled high with plates.
After one such trip, where I had to leave several items behind for fear that the tray would break, I decided that something had to change. The current system of a sign in the staff room reminding people to return plates, and a harassed phone call when there was more customers than plates in the cafe, clearly wasn’t working.
As the main person from the cafe who was making these trips to collect crockery it was in my interest to prevent them from occurring. So I had a brainwave: I knew that the shop staff love cake, and they knew that I made really good cakes (I had made some for various people’s last day), so I decided to bribe them!
For every month that went by with out me having to collect any piece of crockery or cutlery, I would make them a cake.
I introduced this system at the start of November, and so far they have been very good and got two cakes.
Now I am going to share the experiment with you. I am using the cake a month to try new recipes and experiment with techniques and decorations. So this blog is going to be a place where I write about what worked and what didn’t, as well as discuss how the experiment is going.
Sweet Bribery 