Plum Tart with Freshly Milled Rouge de Bordeaux Flour
Part of the fun of being a baker is that sometimes we choose to bake pastries just for ourselves. A few weeks ago, we had extra dough and the neighbor's Italian prune plums, which had recently arrived, and we were trading ideas back and forth about what we should make with them. Margaret, one of our bakers, told us about her favorite pastry when she worked at Sea Wolf in Seattle, a simple croissant dough plum tart, and another, Melissa, reminded me, as she does every year (smile), that plums are her very favorite fruit. I recalled that we also had a batch on hand of plum jam that was too sticky to sell as jarred jam, and all of that coalesced into simple pastry perfection in our eyes.
We have created a rectangular tart made with freshly milled in-house Rouge de Bordeaux flour, a spoonful of frangipane and a single half of an Italian prune plum. The fruit was tossed in brown butter, homemade plum jam and my secret ingredient for nearly every fruit tart that we make: vanilla bean and orange-flower syrup.
The Secret Item this weekend will be a single tart, so that there will be enough for everyone. And if you walk in this weekend and see all of the bakers in a huddle, you can be sure that we are slicing the extra few that we made for ourselves.
In addition, our Weekend Menu which is now open for orders, marks the return of Autumn Pies, including two apple pies made with freshly-picked crisp and juicy apples from Kiyokawa Family Orchards and the Bakeshop Pumpkin Pie. We also now have our delicious Ginger Molasses Cookies back online. And stay tuned in the next few weeks for our announcement of preorders for Holiday Pies.
Just a few notes on operations. Although we have now done a special newsletter subscriber Secret Item two weeks in a row, from this point forward I will be offering the Secret Item every other week hence.
And finally, we, like most every restaurant, bakery, bar, coffee shop and retail establishment are now dependent on an online web platform to process our online orders. We have very limited control over the interface or the backend mechanics of how they set up their systems, which are being built to accommodate a myriad of products and services, which encompass deliveries and pickups for all these clients in this New World. About a year ago we switched to our current provider to make our system more efficient. Unfortunately, there are still some clunky steps involved in the ordering process.
For example, we realize that every customer must enter what is entitled a "Shipping Address" every time they make an online order, even if they intend to pick their pastries up (unless a customer chooses to Create An Account for Faster Checkout, which is an option they make available in the final step of checkout). Realizing that this was an extra processing step for many clients, the service provider came up with a "fix" a couple weeks ago, which eliminated the effort of having to enter that shipping address. However, it created a new problem -- the default for orders on their end was set to Delivery, and unless the customer who wanted pickup manually toggled the button from this default switch from Delivery to Pickup, they were automatically charged the $5 delivery fee. We acknowledge how confusing this was, and have spent a great deal of time tracking several of these charges for people who didn't do the toggle, and have refunded all of those accidental fees.
As of this week though, we have gone back to the original steps. Unfortunately, you will have to enter your shipping address again in step 1 of checkout, then choose Pickup or Delivery in step 2. But no one will be automatically charged the $5 Delivery Fee any more. Unless you want Delivery! In which case, you will have to manually add the $5 fee at the end, like before.
Hope this all makes sense! It is frustrating for us to have to take the time to do this, but again, it is something beyond our control at this point. Thanks for bearing with us.
Stay cozy in the rain!
Best,