Cheesecake lessons (part 1/2)

About 10 years ago, I baked my first cake ever, in the little kitchen of my student apartment. In the last 10 years, my love for baking has grown immensely. Whether it’s my parent’s kitchen, my rental apartment’s kitchen when I was away from home, or now in my very own kitchen, baking was always my stress therapy. In the last couple of months taking a break from my corporate job, I finally followed my passion and launched an online bakery. The bakery has paused to operate as of now, and I am still thinking about options for the next move. However, what happened was already so much more than I could have expected. Afterall, the bakery might not be there one day, but I am sure the precious life lessons I got would go a long way. This series is for the lessons that cheesecake has brought into my life.

My business, like any other business, consists of two main areas: production and sales. In this first part of the series, I’d like to address the production area - in which the only product I sell is cheesecake. 

Image from my bakery's Instagram page, shooting and editing by me

1. Perseverance. Cheesecake is not uncommon in Hanoi and the recipes are easy to be found on the Internet. I started out with a recipe that I handpicked from a food blogger that I followed all along. However, if you are a baker, you know that when it comes to baking, recipe is not everything. It takes a lot more than that to be able to set up a procedure that helps one to bake hundreds or thousands batches of cheesecake with the same quality. With zero professional baking experience, I was happy to learn how to do that on the job, by trial and error. I tried to make each and every batch better than the previous one, even just a little bit. I have thrown away a number of batches that I couldn’t remember before getting to the final foundational recipe that I stick with thereafter. My admiration goes to bakery owners out there with a variety of baked goods everyday, it’s a lot of effort!

2. Grit. There were no official working hours because basically, I worked whenever my customers were craving for cheesecake. For more than a few times, I faced the question of whether to receive an order and bring myself to bake or just reject it in a nice way because I got my personal life to take care of. There were plenty of reasons why to reject: it’s not easy to wake up as early as 4AM, I was on my bed at 11PM and almost fell asleep, or I wanted to hangout with my friends even for a while. In spite of that, there was only one reason to move on: this is what I decided to do, I need to get things done no matter what, and sacrificing my personal life was a part of it. At times, that might not feel like the thing I enjoy the most in this world, but I knew I needed to do it.  

3. Curiosity and an open mind. Working as a baker, in my opinion, involves a lot of creativity, depending on the risk appetite of the baker. I might not be the riskiest person on earth you could find, but I made sure I stay open-minded whenever it comes to cheesecake. A local ingredient, a rare combination, a seasonal flavor, an unpopular technique, you name it. Pandan cheesecake was proudly my favorite creation. Unfortunately, due to different reasons, it hasn’t been launched officially. Meanwhile, I would continue to appreciate the beauty of creativity in baking and take that as a motivation to always try to create better products.

4. Ability to observe and understand the market. Competitors play an important role in the market and understanding them is critical to any business. What are they selling? What kinds of needs are they serving? What products are being loved by customers? Why? These were some of the questions that I needed to ask myself before coming to the decision to pick cheesecake as my core product and some certain flavors as my signature items. 

5. Product positioning. “Know yourself, know your enemy. A hundred battles a hundred victories”, as Sun Tzu put it. Knowing my market and competitors is one thing, but knowing about my own product and its values is another thing. I have done a whole lot of research as well as recipe testing to come up with three core values of my own cheesecake: (1) not overly sweet, as preferred by the majority of Asian customers, (2) dense and smooth texture and (3) rich in premium cream cheese flavor. These three core values later on have helped me to attract certain segments of customers, which I was able to visualize more vividly as time went by. With this in mind, I was continuously looking for ways to enhance the value propositions as well as making my business visible to these potential customer segments.

Thank you for reading part 1 of this series! You can also find part 2 here.