Baker Kim Brandon creates treats for Ridgemark diners
Give Kim Brandon five minutes and she can transform a
single-layer cake off a cooling rack into a masterpiece with just
whipped cream, strawberry filling and a few decorating tools.
Baker Kim Brandon creates treats for Ridgemark diners
Give Kim Brandon five minutes and she can transform a single-layer cake off a cooling rack into a masterpiece with just whipped cream, strawberry filling and a few decorating tools.
Brandon makes up pastries, cookies, brownies, cakes and other sweet treats six days a week for the Ridgemark Golf and Country Club, where she joined the staff in December. But she’s been working around baked goods for a lot longer.
“I started working at Lucky’s when I was 16 years old in the bakery and deli,” she said. “I liked art and drawing and I used to watch a guy decorate cakes. I was surprised I actually picked it up pretty quickly.”
After a year in the deli, Brandon moved to the grocery store bakery full time. She was eventually put in charge of wedding cakes.
“It’s just as easy to draw on cakes as on paper,” she said.
Her day at Ridgemark starts between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m., when she starts work on the pastries that golfers, hotel guests or others purchase in the morning. The treats are stocked in cases with some of her specialties in the snack bar and the dining area. On a recent Friday morning, the offerings included mini eclairs, pineapple upside-down cake, macaroons and cookies. She also bakes several small cakes a day that restaurant-goers can purchase during the lunch or dinner hours.
She works closely with Sandie Weis, the catering director.
“She has been a great boss,” Brandon said. “I am very happy here.”
After working at the grocery store bakery since high school, Brandon started craving an outlet to be more creative with her work and a chance to come up with her own unique recipes.
When she moved to Hollister with her husband of more than 17 years, her hometown sweetheart, she got a job at The Elegant Touch. She worked at the downtown bakery and restaurant until she recently accepted the position at Ridgemark.
One of her favorite recipes she has created is a neopolitan cake, which incorporates chocolate, vanilla and strawberry cake into one.
“I did it at a cake tasting and people started ordering it,” she said.
The cake flavor has been especially popular for Brandon’s wedding clients, she said, since a lot of people want to incorporate more than one flavor of cake but are sometimes worried that if they do different-flavored tiers, guests will come back for more than one serving.
In her years making cakes, she has had a lot of clients who come in with “really extravagant ideas, like a tower of terror,” she said. “The bigger it is, the more it will cost. I try to talk them into a smaller-tiered cake and sheet cakes. For Brandon, the taste of the cake is as important as the way it looks.
“My thing is, when you leave a wedding, you will remember what the cake tasted like but not everyone will remember what it looked like,” she said. “It will keep people coming back.”
Brandon does wedding cakes for events at Ridgemark, as well as banquet events at the club. She is also an approved vendor at Leal Vineyards and does all the cakes for Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital.
She has a lot of say in what she serves on a day-to-day basis at Ridgemark, she said.
“The creativity part,” is what she likes, she said. “Everyday is different.”
But she also gets special requests from a client from time to time.
“A lot of people come in with flavors they like to reinvent,” she said.
She has a basic base she uses and she tweaks her flavors from there. She has uses her coworkers as guinea pigs to try out new recipes. And she said she doesn’t write down any of her recipes, but keeps them all in her head.
One of the special requests she has coming up is to make dumbbell-shaped eclairs for a retirement party for a woman retiring from a local gym.
And through the years, she said she has gotten very few requests to make sugar-free sweets. She mentioned one couple that wanted a sugar-free cake, a request she obliged though she thought the cake didn’t taste too great.
Her next special request will be a birthday cake for her daughter, a 16-year-old San Benito High School student. She saves the baking at home for special occasions only.
“I bake all day long, six days a week,” she said. “I like to cook at home, but I never bake.”
Sweet treats
Kim Brandon’s repertoire includes:
Cakes
Pastries
Macaroons
Cupcakes
Brownies
Éclairs
Pies such as meringue, chocolate cream, pecan, pumpkin, apple
Cookies
Pineapple upside down cake
Cheesecakes
For examples of Kim Brandon’s cake decorating visit her Facebook page or www.ridgemark.com. She can be reached at 801-7248, 637-8151 or by e-mail at
ki********@ya***.com
.
