Blog #28: Mentorship

L:

1. Mentorship Log link:
Mentorship Log

2. Contact name: Ashley McNeal

Phone #: +1 (909) 354-1112

I:

The most important thing that I took from working with my mentor was learning how the cake decorating business works, like how to price the design of a cake and how to talk to customers when discussing their cake order and design. This became so significant to my senior project because being able to understand how the pricing and how to properly treat customers and making connections with them became part of my foundation and also my third answer. I would not have been able to find both is these without the help of my mentor.

  

A:

Throughout my mentorship, I learned about new aspects to cake decorating that I never really realized before. For example, when I started talking to customers, I food out that this is a huge part to cake decorating because they give us the inspiration to the cake designs, an after seeing this and experiencing it for myself, this became my new third answer to me EQ. Also, I gained more information for my foundation, like how pricing works and what happened before actually decorating a cake (the baking of the cake).

Blog #24: Exit Interview Questions

1. The essential question to my Senior Project is "What is the best way to create a decorative art themed wedding cake?" and the best answer to that question is Prioritizing Customer Relations.

2. The process of getting to this answer as my best answer was a lot of trial and error. When I first started finding possible answers, I ignored this as a  key factor, but when I actually got to talk to customers at Cake Mama's, I realized that talking to the customer and designing the cake with them is what is the foundation behind the other two answers.

3. The main problem I had was getting a reliable mentorship. The reason for this is because when I first started working with my first mentor, she told me that she would call me in for every order she got, but I never got any messages from her. Since that failed, I began to search for a new mentor, put myself out there, but because I was underage at the time, no one would take me as an apprentice until Cherokee told me about the Cake Mama's and how they did mentorships, so the way I solved this problem was by asking around me about who they knew.

4. The two most important sources I have were my Third interview with Ashley McNeal, the head cake decorator at The Cake Mama's because she gave a new insight on the world of cake decorating, like making a connection with the customer and how they are the key aspect to the decorating process. The second important source that I have is my 10th Article "Interview #4: Ron-Ben Israel" because it showed me that you don't need to be classically trained to be an amazing cake decorator. He has always been an inspiration to me as an aspiring cake decorator and the article just showed me that not only do you need to have the inspiration to be a cake decorator and some of the key aspects to designing a cake, showed me that you need to find your muse and own style of decorating to be a success.

5. The product for me is definitely deciding what I want to major in when I go off to college, which is Business Management. The fact that I feel more confident with Pastry art does not mean that I know how to work the business itself. This project has helped me realize that I have to learn more about owning a successful business in order to follow my dream of being a pastry artist.

Hectic Day at The Cake Mama's!

       Today was probably one of the most amazing, but stressful, days of my mentorship (Second to Valentine's day, that was just ridiculous). While my mentor, Janelle, and Sabrina went to finish a cake for the Game of Thrones photoshoot, I was left doing the other orders that I knew I could do on my own.





 When I first entered, my mentor literally told me that she was going to "Pinch" me. Apparently, I took an order that was not supposed to be taken, but we got it done just in time! After, that my mentor had me do a bunch or other orders that needed to be finished. This took up my entire day and my feet have never hurt so much.

   After doing all of the orders for the day, I had decided to go to the back of the bakery to see how my co-worker, Gaby, was doing. She had told me that she frosted and filled about 24 cakes since 12 pm, and I thought she was about to go into a corner a cry because that is a lot cakes. I decided to help her out by frosting the last 3 cakes and wash the dishes for her.

Blog #23: Junior Interview

1. The Junior I interviewed was Vanessa Pancheco and she is in West House.

2. While talking to her, she had said that the ideas she had for her Senior Project was between three: Journalism, Animal Rescue, or Marketing. She had told me the main reason she wants to do either of these three is because she feels like one of these will become her future career and be passionate about doing either one of these topics.

3. She told that what she plans to do for her 10 hours over the summer is to volunteer at the Poly post if she decided to follow the journalism path. For Marketing, she had mentioned doing some advertisement for her local library, or doing volunteer work at an animal shelter or the Humane Society if she did animal rescue for her project.

4. Vanessa had said that what she wants to see from the 2-hour presentations is to see how we manage our time during the presentation. Also, she wanted to ask about the process of how we got to this point in our senior project and what to do and not to do during the presentation.

5. The first question Vanessa asked is how I choose my senior project and how she should choose her's. What I had said to her is that it depends on the person. "The reason I choose mine is because I love the idea of doing a food based project." Also, I told her that it depends on how she want to approach the project, by doing something she knows she can do or doing something she is passionate about. The second question she asked was problems she might encounter. I had responded by telling her that finding a mentorship in ideal fields might be difficult because some places only take people at a certain age. Secondly, I had mentioned that research is going to be difficult to find when you reach the midpoint of the year because depending on the topic, research can be or not be difficult to find.

Blog #22: # Column Chart

Link:

3 Column Logic Chart

Blog #21: Independant Component 2

Literal

(A) I, JD Pabon, affirm that I completed my independent component which represents 30 hours of work.

(B) My Sources were my mentor, Ashley McNeal, head cake decorator at the Cake Mama's.

(C) Daily Duties at the Cake Mama's.

(D) At the start, I learned the importance of getting ready way ahead of time for big events. I also learned how to take orders in a way where I can make connections easier with clients. During this time, I learned new business/ consultation techniques, like not to say words like, "No" or "can't".


Interperative

        This was a very fruitful independent component actually. I already knew how to talk to customers, but throughout the component, I learned that talking to customers about cake orders is a completely different ball game. When I first started taking real cake orders, I usually would jump straight to the point, but when Janelle, the owner, confronted me about what I was doing, she told me that I should not jump straight to the point, but talk to them about what they like and what they are looking for so I can get a better idea of what the design should look like.
         Also, I had learned a lot more about the process of doing orders, and singling out things that can be done immediately from the things that take more time to do, like sculptures. Usually I had seen the cake decorators do one order at a time, tackling things at once, but now that I really focused on it, I saw that they took apart the order piece by piece, and did in time increments.

These are the cake push-ups we had prepared for an event at Nordstrom, in Brea Mall. This became a great opportunity to advertise about the bakery and tell people what we are capable of. I had to do 200... by myself. It was TWO DAYS of non stop cake push-ups. I hope I don't have to make those again for a long time.

     

These were some of the random colored fondant discs I made. I had to create about one tray of each color. I think I at least went through 5 full trays, leaving almost none for the rest of the bakery. I felt bad because I constantly thought, "What if they need these? Well, at least I know I used them for a good purpose!"

These are dog biscuits. I was kind of freaked out because I had never thought I would see the day when the bakery would do dog treats. They were really greasy and tough, but I guess the dogs will like them right?

This is going to become a mickey mouse hat for a Disney cake that we were preparing for . The rise krispes were really gooey and difficult to work with but I eventually got it into the right shape.

Applied

         This was a very useful component, for the most part. It definitely helped me with my third answer "Customer Relations". The fact that I got to work with customers all the time and improve my speaking skills was a big plus because I actually got to see my research and studies on customer service into action. Also, I saw things, like breaking apart the orders into sections, in greater detail because I never really paid any attention to it. Now I got to see that organization and communication between everyone in the bakery is crucial for the the business to run smoothly. Helping prepare for the events was also something new that I wish to research. I hope to find things about advertising and reaching target audiences with those events.

Productive day at The Cake Mama's

Today was a very.... Productive day. When first entered the bakery, I was greeted with the smell of fresh cake coming out of the oven. The air was sweet with sugar, and I was ready to tackle the day.
Ashely had started me with a simple task of making some edible images, which I did with haste as I knew there was going to be a lot more fore me to do. The edibles I had done were quick and I ha jumped to the next task of making numbers the rest of the time. I had to prepare numbers from zero to nine.
During that time, I was ale by the financial officer, Corrine, to work on an order that she had just taken. I had to create forty-two disc that had '900' written on them. That task was relatively easy, but was still took up a lot of time.
After finishing that order, I ha continued to work on numbers, but unfortunately, because of how many numbers I had to prep, I did not get to finished them, but ashley that it would be ok because I can continue them the following day when I walked in.
The rest my day was consumed with cleaning dishes in the kitchen, frosting cupcakes for the front of the store, and helping customers. I think that this day was a relatively useful day because I had talked to Corrine about how I am doing in the bakery, and she had tile me that I am doing a great job, but that I needed to work on my focus so that I may get tasks done faster, and be able to focus on the task at hand instead of scattering my mind from the front of the house to the back.
So now I am learning how to focus on focusing on one task at a time and when it is a good time to jump in and help at the front/ back. Hopefully, they see improvement and decide to keep me.