Cool Cakes!

For those of you that don't know it, we can make some really cool cakes. Check out these recent ones! If you'd like a custom cake let us know, but make sure you give us plenty of notice. These cakes can sometimes take hours to make and we can only do so many each weekend.

I actually made this cake for my own 30th birthday. I'm a huge Dave Matthews Band fan and wanted to make a fun DMB cake. These are edible copies of actual ticket stubs.

This was for a bridal shower with a Fiesta type of theme.


I love ocean cakes! This was so fun to make!

Bengals Helmet. At the last minute we thought it would be fun to add an image of Chad Johnson. The birthday boy loved it!

Karen is Awesome!!

Our cake decorating manger, Karen Thomson competed in the Pillsbury/ General Mills creative cake decorating competition in Las Vegas on September 9th & 10th. She came in Third Place overall with first place in the custom designs category and second place in the wedding cake category. She completed 13 cake designs overall including a 3 tier wedding cake, a 3D sculpted cake, a rolled fondant cake, 3 floral designs, 6 custom designs, and a creative surprise design. She competed regionally for the first time this past January and made it to National's. Not a bad finish for a first timer! We are so proud of her but not surprised! We're sure to see her in many more competitions in the future...maybe the Food Network???

(This is a bad picture but Karen's actually holding a trophy here!)

CONGRATULATIONS KAREN!!!!!

3 Walls So Far!

Sorry I haven't posted anything in quite sometime! This summer has been an extremely busy one but so far the new store has 3 brick walls!!! The electric and plumbing is being run into the ground and we expect the slab to be poured any day now. I will post some more photos as soon as I can get them off my really slow memory card.

A Taste of Elegance is also going through many changes. Yesterday all of our employees attended a seminar on "The Art of Giving Great Service." We brought in the best to help turn our employees into "the best." A small deli in Michigan called Zingermans has pretty much mastered the art of service and they offer training through an extension of their business called ZingTrain. You see, when Melody and I opened ATOE we knew how to give good service. We opened the business because we loved doing what we do and we wanted to please other people. With such rapid growth it has been hard to keep up with getting the work done, running the business, and always training our employees properly. It's so easy to just find a warm body and throw them out there because you so desperately need someone right now! But we are learning and we hope to see an improvement in the service we offer and we hope you do to! We'd like to soon implement a mystery shopper program using our current and new customers so that we can measure our level of service. If you're interested...let me know!

Aside from our service we are working on creating some great new products. Don't worry...the recipes aren't changing...we're just going to add some new flavors and some fun sweet treats to the menu. We just have a lot of space in the new store and we had to come up with something to fill that space! Why not more treats? Plus they're fun to make. One day I'd like to have my own "test kitchen". I could play with new flavors and ideas all the time if I didn't have anything else to do!