ANNA — When national retailer Bed Bath & Beyond needed cupcakes last September to photograph for a print advertising insert, the ad director turned to Anna baker Rachel New to create the sweet treats.
New has been baking and decorating cakes for eight years. She was up to the challenge. But it has been more local clients that have driven her to expand her business.
Rachel’s Cakes was home-based until April. That’s when New opened a full-fledged bakery at 313 W. Main St., Anna. Now, she’s whipping up cookies, cookie sandwiches, muffins, bars and cupcakes in addition to custom-ordered cakes in the compact facility.
“My husband and I decided that I was so busy doing it out of my house, it would be best to have a storefront,” she said. “We needed a bigger space to be able to do more.”
And more she does. The investment of more than $60,000 to purchase, decorate and furnish the building with commercial-grade equipment has permitted New to multiply the product line to serve walk-in customers as well as those who make special orders.
The home oven could accommodate the baking of 24 cupcakes at a time. The commercial oven in the bakery handles 48 cupcakes on five levels.
“It’s cut my baking time by probably three times,” New said. And that’s significant, because every Thursday to Saturday, New fills orders for an average of 25 cakes a week.
“I don’t sleep,” she admitted. The cakes are for weddings, birthday parties, graduations, family celebrations, first communions and other events. She begins baking them on Thursday afternoons and decorates all day Friday.
“Some people pick them up on Friday, but mostly it’s Saturday,” she said. Most weeks, New stays up from the time she starts baking until the last cake has gone out the door. Her husband, Randy New, an accountant, and her sister, Lindsey Spangler, of Sidney, take care of the News’ two sons, Locklan, 8, and Wilder, 6 months, during Rachel’s marathon bakery sessions. Spangler is also learning to ice cupcakes and Rodney takes care of landscaping the property and washing the dishes.
“He’s been a saint,” New said.
She doesn’t work on Sundays and Mondays. Rachel’s Cakes is open Wednesday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The midweek days are much calmer. On Tuesday, the baker creates a list of the kinds of sweets she wants to fill her case on Main Street and then gets busy making them.
“I try to do new stuff each week, but definitely more popular flavors, I bring back each week,” she said.
The day this reporter visited, there were chunky monkey and blueberry muffins; cookies and cream, buckeye brownie, lemon and zucchini bars; brownie cookie dough, chocolate chip and gluten-free chocolate cookie sandwiches; s’more and iced carrot cookies; and strawberry cheesecake, bubble gum, blueberry pancake, cake batter, peanut butter crunch and worms and dirt cupcakes.
The latter was the Locklan’s “recipe.” Each week, he selects cupcake and icing flavors and designs decorations for one of the shop’s offerings.
“Last week, it was a red velvet cake with butter cream icing, decorated with M&Ms and caramel sauce,” New said.
Cupcakes and muffins sell for $3 each; cookies, for $1.50 each; bars for $3.50 each. Half a dozen cupcakes cost $15; a dozen, $30. Custom cakes are priced individually. Credit cards are accepted.
As New tracks sales to determine how much to make of what, a clear favorite has already emerged.
“The most popular thing in the case is the buckeye brownie. It’s a fudge brownie with peanut butter and toffee icing in the middle and a chocolate ganache on top,” she said. Even talking about it makes one appreciate a sign among several on the bakery wall: “Calories don’t count on the weekend.”
Whatever doesn’t sell within two days gets donated to a food bank or thrown out. New continues to experiment with recipes, which she gets from the Internet, Pinterest and cookbooks.
“I search everywhere for them and then adapt them,” she said. “There’s a lot of trial and error.” She tends to make one thing at a time: cookies first, then cupcakes, muffins and brownies. Her time for cake-baking fills up quickly, so she likes people to make custom orders a month in advance.
“Except for May. My husband is an accountant. He has his ‘tax season.’ What with graduations, confirmations, first communions, Mother’s Day, wedding showers, baby showers, I call May my tax season. For May orders, they need to call in January,” New said. Wedding cakes must be ordered at least six months in advance.
The bakery will not offer pies. According to New, pies require special licensing and certifications for storing and displaying that she does not have.
Decorating cupcakes is not the limit of New’s artistic talent. She also designed her shop’s sign and decorated its interior, including peppering the ceiling with bright pink polka-dots — a painting job she undertook despite her pregnancy. A small bench sports doughnut- and cupcake-shaped throw pillows. A black board on the wall above it lists the week’s specials. Huge wooden letters spell “C-A-K-E” above the refrigerator and pretty cake stands on the display case await their sweet residents.
A framed copy of the Bed Bath & Beyond advertisement hangs in a place of honor among several several signs with clever sayings. But one sign seems to summarize the talented, energetic owner of Rachel’s Cakes. It says, “She believed she could so she did.”
