The Recipe Club (a Random House/Clarkson Potter web-based community for cookbooks)posted a piece on us in their author spotlight: http://www.therecipeclub.net/2011/07/12/the-whimsical-bakehouse-a-sweet-experience/
Read the piece below, or visit the site and find out more about the Recipe Club.
For the last 17 years my mom, Kaye Hansen, has owned and operated The Riviera Bakehouse, a Westchester, NY staple for over 50 years. During this time the bakery grew from a small bakery to a sizable business with 60 employees and thousands of customers.
Running a small business successfully requires the owner’s utmost dedication. This is especially true in the baking business where the hours are long, the work is labor-intensive, and around the holidays – when most people look forward to time off – we go into overdrive. But while I’m not unfamiliar with the challenges of running a bakery, I recently started contemplating it with new eyes – the eyes of an owner. That is because my mom is passing the torch to me.
This is an exciting time in our lives – and we look forward to working together, this time with our roles reversed. There’s much for me to learn from my mom still, and I plan to spend the balance of the year “seeing through her eyes,” learning from her valuable experiences, fostering relationships with our employees and customers, and planning for the future. In addition to cake decorating, I will need to master other facets of the business: inventory management, production of cakes, cookies, breakfast items, sandwiches, and so much more. And while my mom had a great business partner, her husband Peter, who ran the back end of the bakery, I feel equally blessed to have my husband, Luiz, who comes out of years in the corporate world, to be my partner.
I am happy my mom decided to stay on part-time for a while, and I value her support. But most importantly, I look forward to our continued creative collaboration for years to come.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
My Paintings
My dream, ever since middle school, was to be an artist. By college age, I knew that the likelihood of making a career out of painting was slim, but that did not stop me from getting a BFA. If someone asked me what my plans were after graduation, I would tell them, "All I know is what I don't want to do - I don't want to work in a kitchen." I knew full well how labor intensive cooking and baking were because I had always been my mom's assistant in her culinary endeavors.
Well, Ha! I've been working at the Riviera Bakehouse for 17 years. It has turned out to be a great creative outlet and I do feel at home in the bakery. But I have never stopped painting. Often my pieces don't leave my studio, but I feel a need to keep producing. It is a mode of expression I can't achieve in chocolate and buttercream.
I created a website, a work in progress, to share my paintings.
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