Back to the Basics

Hello everyone!

Wow has it been a long time!!  Sorry to the 3 of you who read this blog semi-regularly I've interrupted your summer reading a bit.  To be fair, several people mentioned to us how they missed our blogging, so maybe if this baking thing fails we can just turn to blogging?  Maybe...??

Anyway, it has been a crazy and unexpected summer, both good and bad, but as we roll full steam into August Pittsburgh Sweet Relief is back and baking, finally!

The past six weeks or so we have taken almost a complete hiatus from baking as we handled some personal items that took us away from the kitchen.  We practically shut down our kitchen, only filling two orders, and focused more on friends and family that needed our help.  We turned down quite a few orders, and if you're one of those people we turned down, we hope you understand that while baking is our love, family and friends come before any cake or pie or cookie.

Today we fired up the ovens for the first time in awhile baking some wonderful cupcakes for an order this week.  It was so wonderful to load everything back up into the mixer and switch the power lever to "On" as if no time had ever passed.  Eggs, sugar, vanilla, into the bowl they went.  How did we leave our kitchen for six weeks?

That being said, we're still going to be taking things a little slow for the time being.  Besides the fact that we have to get used to regularly baking again (and the awful dishes that come with that), we still would like to enjoy this last month of summer as well.  August is definitely our favorite month of the year!

So stay tuned, we won't stay away so long this time, we promise! :-)

August Living

IT'S AUGUST!!!!!!!!!!!! :-)

We're sorry for all you haters out there, but August is our favorite month of the year!  Besides it being our birth month (and who doesn't love their birth month??!!?!) it's also,  in our opinion, the best summer month out there.  It seems like all sorts of fun things happen in August.  Family vacations, bonfires, early football games, pool parties....did we mention vacation??  Because we're going on vacation in less than 2 weeks, and we absolutely cannot wait!

We have one last order this weekend, and then we're peacing out for a 14 day hiatus until we're back with some more orders in late August/early September.  In that two week span we will:

1. Head to the beach with our favorite sister for some sun and surf (and boys!  Lots of boys.)
2. Attend our first ever Backstreet Boys/Jesse McCartney/DJ Pauly D concert in Cleveland.  Don't be jealous, even though we know you are.
3. Head out to a first place Buccos game.  We love baseball games in general, but heading out to a Buccos game right now...it's absolutely electric
4. Try out a few ideas we have for some new cupcake flavors.  Fall is coming...is it too early to start investing in some pumpkin?
5. Watch lots of awful television that we haven't had time to catch up on.

Even though this is a job we love (and we mean LOVE!), we still like to take some time off every once in awhile to sort of relax, refocus, and get all our ducks back in a row.  Whenever we've taken some time off in the past we've come back chomping at the bit to get back in the kitchen...that's always a good sign that you're doing something you love.  Most people don't like returning to their jobs after vacation, and to be honest, if someone wanted to pay us to never work again, we'd be fine with that too.  But coming back from vacation and heading back into the kitchen...we can't wait!

It's been a tremendously busy few weeks, and we've been honored and humbled by all the love, support, and (maybe most importantly) orders you guys have sent our way these past few weeks.  Birthdays (lots of birthdays!) weddings, baby showers, we have seen just about everything under the sun these past few weeks.  And we love it!  It's great to watch as our business slowly starts to grow through recommendations from others who have sampled some of our previous tastes.

Now the only question remains...who's going to bake us a birthday cake??

Have a fabulous weekend, guys.  Let's go Bucs!