Looking for a way to perk up a birthday party? Brighten a bar or bat mitzvah? Wow wedding guests? Delight your dad in the best possible way? Catch the attention of an eight-year-old? Celebrate a colleague heading into retirement? The answer to all of the above—and more—is to order a custom-decorated cake from the Bakehouse. Man, oh man, do they do incredible work!
I was reminded once again how darned amazing these cakes are when I ordered one last week for Tammie’s birthday. Remember the Tao of Archibald Tiny that I wrote about two weeks ago? Well, here’s Archie making a guest appearance on Tammie’s cake!
These cakes don’t just look amazing—they’re irresistibly good. I almost never eat dessert, but these are so delicious, I quickly polished off a generous slice. For Tammie’s Archie-themed birthday cake, the crew even made a custom apricot filling just for me!
People tend to wait for special occasions to order cakes like this, but I’ll suggest that flow can work in reverse, too! Anytime you get one of these cakes on the table will, by definition, become both special and delicious! And also magically memorable! Tammie’s cake was just one of many amazing works of cake art that the crew has crafted in recent months. They made a 12-foot-long cake for the 150th anniversary of the Dental School! And another for Burns Park School’s 100th! Alyce Machcinski from the Cake Studio shares,
We truly love being a part of celebrations around our community, large and small. Often when thinking of custom cakes, we think of the wedding cakes we make, but it’s just as special to be a part of so many other birthdays, showers, graduations … and of course huge milestones like those of the Dental School and Burns Park this year! The U of M Dental School is celebrating their 150th anniversary this year and Burns Park Elementary School celebrated their 100th year, so we had to make some appropriately scaled creations to match the occasion!
We typically start planning those months in advance, especially for big cakes. We need at least two weeks notice for custom cakes through the Cake Studio, and our availability for these cakes is limited as we want to make sure we give each order the time and attention required. As always, we are able to customize decoration, filing, and icing for our standard cakes that we have on rotation every day with at least two days’ notice.
The Dental School cake was composed of 6 flavors in the main long cake, and a separate gluten-free 1/2 sheet cake. Flavors were: carrot cake with cream cheese, buttermilk cake with lemon buttercream, buttermilk cake with strawberry buttercream, buttermilk cake with chocolate buttercream, chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream, and chocolate cake with salted caramel buttercream. For the gluten-free cake, it was our Townie Brownie with vanilla buttercream. All super tasty! It was 150″—6 full sheet cakes, laid end to end, and all assembled on site at their event. It was quite a feat and a verrry long cake!
The Burns Park celebration chose chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream for the main showpiece cake (that was built as a very tall 1/2 sheet cake, hand carved to look similar to the school), and we made 700 cupcakes in a variety of flavors; 500 of of which were passed out to the kids at recess that day.
Through this work, my hope is that these amazing Zingerman’s cakes can become part of the history of the community—featured in photos from weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs, confirmations, graduations, birthdays, retirements, football weekends, and pretty much every other occasion one can imagine! Order now, celebrate soon, spread smiles and joy widely!
In 1982, Ari Weinzweig, along with his partner Paul Saginaw, founded Zingerman’s Delicatessen with a $20,000 bank loan, a Russian History degree from the University of Michigan, 4 years of experience washing dishes, cooking and managing in restaurant kitchens and chutzpah from his hometown of Chicago. They opened the doors with 2 employees and a small selection of specialty foods and exceptional sandwiches.
Today, Zingerman’s Delicatessen is a nationally renowned food icon and the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses has grown to 10 businesses with over 750 employees and over $55 million in annual revenue. Aside from the Delicatessen, these businesses include Zingerman’s Bakehouse, Coffee Company, Creamery, Roadhouse, Mail Order, ZingTrain, Candy Manufactory, Cornman Farms and a Korean restaurant that is scheduled to open in 2016. No two businesses in the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses are alike but they all share the same Vision and Guiding Principles and deliver “The Zingerman’s Experience” with passion and commitment.
Besides being the Co-Founding Partner and being actively engaged in some aspect of the day-to-day operations and governance of nearly every business in the Zingerman’s Community, Ari Weinzweig is also a prolific writer. His most recent publications are the first 4 of his 6 book series Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading Series: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Building a Great Business (Part 1), Being a Better Leader (Part 2), Managing Ourselves (Part 3) and the newly-released Part 4, The Power of Beliefs in Business. Earlier books include the Zingerman’s Guides to Giving Great Service, Better Bacon, Good Eating, Good Olive Oil, Good Vinegar and Good Parmigiano-Reggiano.
Ari regularly travels across the country (and world) on behalf of ZingTrain, teaching organizations and businesses about Zingerman’s approach to business. He is a sought-after Keynote speaker, having delivered keynotes for Inc. 500, Microsoft Expo Spring Conference, Great Game of Business Gathering of Games, Positive Business Conference at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, American Society for Quality (ASQ), and the American Cheese Society. Most recently, Ari and Paul Saginaw were invited to address an audience of 50,000 for the University of Michigan 2015 Spring Commencement.
One of Zingerman’s Guiding Principles is being an active part of the community and in 1988, Zingerman’s was instrumental in the founding of Food Gatherers, a food rescue program that delivers over 5 million pounds of food each year to the hungry residents of Washtenaw county. Every year Zingerman’s donates 10% of its previous years profits to local community organizations and non-profits. Ari has served on the board of The Ark, the longest continuously operating folk music venue in America.
Over the decades, the Zingerman’s founding partners have consistently been the recipients of public recognition from a variety of diverse organizations. In April 1995, Ari and Paul were awarded the Jewish Federation of Washtenaw County’s first Humanitarian Award. In 2006, Ari was recognized as one of the “Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America” by the James Beard Foundation. In 2007, Ari and Paul were presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award from Bon Appetit magazine for their work in the food industry. Ari was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Cheese Society in 2014. And Ari’s book, Building a Great Business was on Inc. magazine’s list of Best Books for Business Leaders.
Notwithstanding the awards, being engaged on a daily basis in the work of 10 businesses and 21 partners, writing books on business and in-depth articles on food for the Zingerman’s newsletter, Ari finds time to be a voracious reader. He acquires and reads more books than he can find room for. Ari might soon find himself the owner of the largest collection of Anarchist books in Ann Arbor outside the Labadie collection at the University of Michigan library!
