Better Than Paris

Bossman had a friend at the bakery today, a French guy who helped in some way (I'm not sure how) with the Big Competition that Bossman won in 2005. So Philippe is looking at my croissants, and he tells Bossman they're nicer than the ones in Paris. (France, not Texas.) So that was kind of cool. We've also been selling a ton of them--today we even sold out of my red-headed stepchildren, a.k.a. the almond croissants. For some reason, they don't sell very well, and it's a rare day when we sell them all. We also got cool little paper cups for the monkey bread, and we sold a bunch of those today, too; the paper cups also make it much easier for me to assemble and store the damned things.

They're a great solution, too. I'd been putting my dough scraps into the next batch of dough, but that seemed to be causing a problem, or so Bossman concluded. I suggested the monkey bread--how can you go wrong with croissant dough, cinnamon, and sugar?--and then was faced with the problem of assembly. I was using our large muffin tins, but they're a pain, and you can only get twelve on a sheet pan, and so on. One day last week Bossman is cutting up strips of paper and taping it into rings: he'd looked into the sizes available of these paper panettone cups, and we chose the size closest to the muffin tins. They came in yesterday, and they're perfect: they have straight sides, which means they fit next to each other. They're individual cups, so I can (a) fit more on a sheet pan and (b) only bake as many as I want to bake. In addition, I found a deep-sided hotel pan that fits on top of a sheet pan, which works much better as a holding bin than the sheet pan--I just take my scraps, cut them up, and throw them in the bin in the freezer as I go, and every couple of days I pull out the pan in the morning, let it thaw a little, fill as many cups as I have dough for, and throw holding bin and a now-full-of-monkey-bread-cups sheet pan into the freezer. And customers? When they ask what's in the product and hear the answer, they typically Must Have One Now.

Flat Nephew came to the bakery today, too, though Flat Narya hasn't come alive yet. About what, you ask, am I talking? I got a letter from Nephew One last week, complete with a paper doll (hand-made) of himself and a girl paper doll for me to color in to look like me. Nephew One's class read Flat Stanley, and the project they're doing involves each kid sending a flat version of him/herself to someone who lives in another state. I'm supposed to send Flat Nephew and Flat Narya back to him, along with an account of his visit and tales of my state. Today Flat Nephew came to the bakery and posed with Artie, Johnnie, Phil (the Hispanic Phil), Bossman, and a tray of croissants. Bossman posed with his trophy, and with me (the 3-D version). I took down the names of the cities in Mexico from which Artie, Johnnie, and Phil come, figuring the whole immigrant angle would be interesting. I'm also going to take pictures of a statue of Abe Lincoln (it being his land here and all) and some of the interesting sights downtown, seeing as I'm going downtown on Monday. (I'll have Flat Narya colored in by then, so she can appear in some photos as well.) I would have liked to take the Flats to the prairie (we've got a bit of it somewhere around here), but I have no vehicle and not a lot of time. I will get to the lake, it being two blocks away and all--maybe I'll take a break from my marathon editing session tomorrow. I hope the pictures come out okay; I don't have a camera, so I got a couple of those disposable ones.