Ah, sweet fruit crumbles! Sadly, they were just removed from our display. It is a jar filled up with juicy fruit compote, sweet milk cream, and our original recipe granola crumbles on top. Did you know that this fruit crumble was our baker J’s creation? And yes, there are stories about the crumble’s birth as well.
Our baker J was not always that bad. In fact, earlier, our head baker said he had some potential and decided to ask him to develop his own dessert recipe. That event was when J began to show his potential… in mistakes.
The beginning did not look too bad. J used to work in a kitchen a long time ago in a large restaurant. He had some pastry recipes from his previous works. Thus, he quickly introduced one he could use for our cafe. It was called a peach cobbler.
As you will notice as I go further with the story, of course, the initial recipe was very different from what we have in our display. The original recipe was the peach compote and granola crumbles (or cobblers) topped with soft serve ice cream. Of course, Wicked Cafe is a cafe, so we cannot serve our goods in a restaurant-style setup. J’s job was to make the recipe suitable for the cafe setting, and that’s where the troubles began.
J literally had no idea how we have been developing our new menus. He imagined that once he had the idea, made the samples and made other people taste it, the idea would magically turn into our new menu. Sadly (for him), he was not aware that all those works were his responsibilities, not someone else’s.
The boss seemed to be really frustrated with him. While he just threw ideas into his face, he was not doing anything until someone told him to do something in detail. In fact, even telling him what to do would not guarantee anything being done (as you will see in my future posts). Whenever he was staying late in the kitchen just trying to catch up on the prep list and work on his project, I had to be there to do the night delivery (yes, that was before he learned how to handle delivery orders) so that we would not waste our cost for keeping the kitchen open. Because the boss was worried about J, he told me to check and report whatever he was doing.
One day, as I tried to follow that very order, I saw a curious sight. J seemed to be really focused on what he was doing. It appeared to me that he was measuring his fruit crumbles. Such an act would have made sense if it was to find out the weight of each component. But as I heard later, he was not testing out the weight (the boss told me that he already did it when he asked J to do it after a long wait). He was actually making the products to be sold. Then, why the heck was he measuring those? He later gave us an excuse that he just tried to make all the products equal. That just blew our minds.
Unfortunately (for such a noteworthy project), we discontinued fruit crumbles to give space for other new menus, as we always have done. J’s first project was not that successful, but who knows? We look forward to seeing more successful projects from him by learning from his mistakes.