Iced pumpkin cookies
We’re kicking into fall! Get ready for caramel apple cupcakes (the wait is over!), iced pumpkin cookies (a few of you couldn’t wait and special ordered these in September), pumpkin chocolate chip muffins (yes they’re back!) and the pumpkin roll (with or without toasted pecans smushed into the cream cheese filling).
To make room for these additions, we’ll temporarily retire key lime and lemon bars, blueberry crumb bars, the coconut cupcake and the lemon cupcake. You can still order coconut and lemon cakes though.
We will do our best to have lots of Halloween cut-out cookies on hand between now and October 31, but if you want to be sure to get some, please consider ordering them online. I know I keep inching up the price on these – currently $2.25 – but they are incredibly labor-intensive. We VERY happily welcomed a new decorator this month, Karen Rappaport, and I am hoping that her addition will make it easier for us to keep these cookies in stock, especially during the holidays.
Sour cream pumpkin pie
I can’t believe Thanksgiving is right around the corner! To simplify things, we will have a slightly modified menu of items available for Thanksgiving orders. You will be able to pre-order cakes and pies, as well as cookies, muffins and cupcakes so long as they are in sets of a dozen of a particular flavor.
For those of you wanting a bigger variety of cookies, muffins and cupcakes, we will have our usual offerings at the bakery the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, but you might want to come by on the earlier side in order to be sure you can get what you want. Does this sound like too many rules? I’m so sorry if it does! Just trying to find the right balance between making our customers happy and preserving the sanity of my staff!
Pumpkin chocolate chip muffins
We have added to our happy bakery family. Next time you stop by, let us introduce you to Aidan Gleason, Carly Meyers, Karen Richardson, Karen Rappaport, Addie Crowley , Miriam Ruminski, Jim Gordon and Martha Deale. We also welcome back Gali Sapir after her trip to Israel and we thank Joseph Benson for taking on the unenviable task of mopping the frosting-smeared floor of the bakery every night!
Some of our fancier Halloween cookies
We will miss Ana Caceres (returned to the Univ. of MD), Lauren Klein (off to the Rhode Island School of Design), and Janine Joly (heading to Northwestern Univ.) but we KNOW they will come back and visit.
OK that’s it for now. Sorry this got so long! May your fall be fun and full of flavors!
Jenny
We’re finally getting around to making the official transition from spring to summer so we will be making a few changes at the bakery to keep things fun.
We will slowly phase out our strawberry mini-pies and strawberry bread as strawberries go out of season. BUT, we’ll keep our seasonal blueberry crumb bars on the menu for now since they’ve been so popular!
We have a couple of new summer specials: chilled lemon ricotta cookies, chocolate chip cookie dough frosting and oreo cookies. We’ll also bring back our key lime and lemon bars (alternating weeks) which have become a JennyCakes summertime favorite.
I bring the lemon ricotta cookies on our annual trip with friends to Knoebels Amusement Park in Pennsylvania. In the morning we parents sit on the lovely front porch of the farmhouse where we stay and drink coffee and eat chilled lemon ricotta cookies. At the encouragement of many of these friends — especially Kensington 8K Race director John Seabreeze! – I am now offering these at the bakery and have a hard time resisting them myself. You’ll see them on a plate in our refrigerated case.
Within five minutes of posting on facebook a photo of a chocolate cupcake with a big scoop of chocolate chip cookie dough frosting on top, I received a phone call from two little girls who wanted me to put some aside for them! The frosting is decadent and yummy. I use mini-chocolate chips so the frosting will be more creamy and less chunky. And don’t worry about salmonella, there are no eggs in the frosting.
Also at Knoebels I saw such a simple idea for a cookie: the base of a chocolate chip cookie but with cookies and cream cookie chunks in it instead of chocolate chips. Given how quickly the cookies and cream cupcake gained in popularity, I’m guessing that our customers will love this cookie flavor as well.
We’ve also introduced a new permanent item on the menu: the JennyCake. It’s a sliced cupcake with something fun in between the layers and something fun on top. We’ve recently been doing fruit-based JennyCakes: a yellow cupcake sliced in half, with blueberries or strawberries and whipped cream in between and also on top. The combination possibilities are infinite. Feel free to email me at jenny@jennycakesbakery.net if you have some ideas!
Try to find a way to enjoy these summer days! It seems like summer used to pass by so slowly, giving me a chance to relax, savor and enjoy each hot humid day. Now summer whizzes by filled with lots of activities. Every once in a while I get a glimpse of those slower summers and force myself to stop moving, sit down and enjoy that slowness, usually with a lemon ricotta cookie! I hope you can find a way to do that as well.
Love, Jenny
I took a moment this weekend to do a review of how JennyCakes Bakery is doing after its first 2 years. The good news is that our amazing customers have helped make the bakery a thriving and fun hub of activity, and all of us at the bakery get great joy out of making yummy food and conversing with our eclectic and loyal customers!
We love being a part of all of your celebrations (showers, gender reveal parties, weddings, birthdays, baptisms, bar (bat) mitzvahs, first communions, breast cancer recovery parties) and helping you comfort those whose day might be brightened by a pretty cupcake or a cranberry granola cookie.
The bad news is that we are not yet breaking even on a month-to-month basis, even though I have not been taking a salary. I’m not exactly sure why this is. Most of the time, we are making a volume of baked goods that seriously tests our limits in terms of space and time!We shop for good deals on ingredients (turns out butter is way more expensive than Crisco, go figure!), make many of our own equipment repairs, and we are always tinkering with our systems for making things so that we are more time-efficient. However, there is one area where we will not reduce costs; we will continue to pay our truly gifted and dedicated staff at a living-wage rate.
We remain passionately committed to offering our baked goods at affordable prices, but this 2-year review has forced me to face the fact that a change in pricing is necessary as one step toward making this tiny bakery a viable enterprise. As much as I hate doing this, I think you will find that this increase still keeps us below the going rate for our type of baked goods in the DC area.
So starting April 15, cupcakes will be $2.25 ($25/dozen), 6” cakes will be $18, 9” cakes will be $28, and 12” and sheet cakes will be $50. A few of the specialty cakes will be a tiny bit higher than this, such as the German Chocolate, Cassata, Salted Caramel, and Gluten-Free cakes, because of the high cost of the ingredients that go into them. We hope this change will do the trick and bring us into the black.
Thank you so very much for your support and for being such a big part of our little JennyCakes community. We hope you will continue to visit us and enjoy our baked goodies!
Love, Jenny
What a long cold winter! I remember crossing Armory Ave from the Safeway garage on my way to the bakery on a few of those low-digit mornings and feeling like I was walking through a freezing cold wind tunnel as the wind swept from the train tracks down Armory toward Town Hall. Brrrr!
I’m VERY happy to be moving on to spring! We’re a little late in sending out a spring post because we got distracted by a stretch of time when the bakery was plagued (or cursed, as my staff likes to say) by a broken dishwasher, a refrigerated display case that stopped working, problems with our hot water and several other frustrating woes.
But NOW all is well and we are happy, happy, happy! The dishwasher is at last fixed. We have a new refrigerated display case, thanks to Suburban Trading (who sold it to me) and Mario (whose crew from the Kensington Gas Station on Antique Row did amazing work in fitting a 35″ wide display case through a 35″ wide door three days before the Easter rush). We have a new hot water heater and in general things are functioning smoothly, knock on wood!
And what’s even better, we have been busy, busy, busy! The last month or so included a very busy Easter, a crazy Mother’s Day and lots of beautiful First Communion, graduation and wedding cakes, thanks to the efforts of Kristen Kellogg, our unique and pink-haired cake decorator.
We have one new addition to the bakery, Gali Sapir. Gali is from Israel — she works very hard and is a joy to have with us at the bakery. She specializes in fondant, but don’t worry, we’ll still be using buttercream for the most part. We just may add some fondant accents from time to time.
We are so sad that Julie Howard will be leaving us soon to focus on finishing up her teaching degree, but she has promised to come in on Friday afternoons for a couple of hours from time to time. I am thrilled to welcome back my pretend daughter :), Ana Caceres Hernandez, who was a student at the University of Maryland during the school year.
But OK, enough about us! Here’s what’s new for you at the bakery. We’ve brought back the blueberry crumb bars (or blueberry slabs, as Jason Swain, the Town’s public works supervisor, calls them — I think it’s an Australia thing) and strawberry icebox pies (graham cracker crust and lots of fresh strawberries).
We’ve added strawberry bread (one of my staff members, Kara Knips, calls it one of our “damn you, Jenny” baked goods) and strawberry buttercream (which, after many failed attempts, at last has the big kick of strawberry flavor I wanted without watering down the frosting too much).
And last but not least, we will be introducing Hillary’s heart healthy bran muffin. Based on my dear friend Hillary’s recipe for incredibly yummy and moist bran muffins (with dried cherries and toasted almonds), I’m still tinkering with this one, but we’ll get there. I’m bound and determined to have one truly healthy yet delicious thing on the menu!
Once again, happy happy spring! Enjoy this short season and check back in with us in a month or two for new things happening for summer!
Jenny
Please remember to get your Christmas orders in soon!
December is here and I – along with many others I’m sure – am trying not to panic about how few gifts I’ve gotten for family and friends so far! But I’m trying hard, in between batches of cookie dough and cake batter, to occasionally take a deep breath and enjoy a cheerful interaction with a customer, a bite of shortbread, or the view of my holiday bakery windows so beautifully designed by Cinda Debbink.
This Christmas season our specials include the buche de noel, jam thumbprints, pecan snowballs, cut-out sugar cookies, chocolate cupcake/cake with peppermint buttercream, gingerbread cookies and shortbread. A box of JennyCakes goodies would be an easy yet thoughtful gift for teachers, bus drivers, neighbors, friends and family! You might even think about giving some cut-out sugar cookies or jam thumbprints to someone who isn’t expecting a gift from you!
Our schedule is a little different this month. We will have our usual hours through Christmas, plus additional hours of noon to 5 on the Sundays leading up to Christmas, and 8am to noon on Christmas Eve. We will be closed from Dec 25 to Jan 1 but will reopen on Thurs Jan 2.
Have a wonderful holiday season and a happy happy new year!
Jenny
We’re having lots of fun with Halloween this year. Check out the photos below of some of our Halloween treats! If you’d like to order some, go to Cookies and Bars and look for Cut-Out Sugar Cookies or to Classic Yellow and Chocolate Cupcakes and give special instructions for Halloween decorations. It’s a fun time of year, right?
Welcome to our new website! We hope you will find this website more helpful and maybe even prettier than our last website. Thanks so much to Cinda Debbink and Valerie Wilmot (our website gurus) and Linda Wolpert (our amazing photographer) for all their help!
Our very popular caramel apple cupcake!
Next up — our transition from summer to fall! After so enjoying summer and its lazier pace, I was reluctant to yield to autumn. But the crisp cool air on these last few mornings has finally made me excited about apples and pumpkins, Halloween and Thanksgiving.
Saying hello and goodbye to some of our goodies. As we transition to autumn on October 1, we will retire a few things (although they will still be available by special order), bring back a few old favorites and introduce a few new things.
Our new pecan pie bars — a toasted pecan shortbread topped with an ooey gooey layer of pecan pie filling.
Look for the return of our pumpkin chocolate chip muffin, the pumpkin roll and of course the very popular and much missed caramel apple cupcake! Come by and check out our new pecan pie bar, iced pumpkin cookie and my Aunt Val’s coffee cake, and don’t forget our sour cream pumpkin pie, pecan pie (with or without a spoonful of bourbon), and apple pie with streusel. Look for Halloween cut-out cookies soon as well!
We hope you’ll stop by and celebrate autumn with us!
Jenny
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