We had a bake sale today at The Day Job to kick off the Christmas festivities.  Cindy’s treats were a huge hit.  She’s been researching smaller sweet items for the holidays and tried three new items.  The best of the bunch was a chocolate cookie dipped in icing and roasted almonds at one end — they sort of look like a lit cigar although they don’t taste like one at all.   They’re fun to eat in three small bites — the first taste is almonds, followed by chocolate and almonds, and finally pure chocolate.   Yum!

No surprise to you that it’s been a while since we’ve baked for you all.   We really miss it.  The best part of the bake sale was seeing the joy in the eyes of the folks who bought our baking.  That’s the best part of our bread baking too.  Not connecting up with you makes this journey to opening even longer.

Goldilocks and the Road to a Real Bakery

Over the last four months we worked long hours getting a lease in place, but with no real success.  We’ve had two opportunities fall through:  a too-small site near downtown which found us caught between a zoning issue and an impatient landlord, and a too-large site near Taylor Field in which the landlord was wonderful but the building was too large, too soon.

While we learned a lot with both sites and met some very helpful people, we’re still searching for a ‘just right’ location.  Or maybe ‘good enough’ is a better way to put it.  Big enough for an oven, mixer, refrigeration and, of course, a place for customers to stand, and maybe park nearby.  But not so large we go broke paying rent.

We’ve got a couple more leads to follow up, and one space with great potential but a very reluctant landlord.  So hopefully we’ll have more information to share soon.

Announcing the Bootnik email list

When we started this site I made a few beginner mistakes around keeping everyone in the loop.  I spent some time this fall getting everything pulled together so that all of you can get consistent updates without our email account getting tagged as a spammer.

We’re now using an email provider called Mailchimp to send out the emails to everyone who’s on our Orange Boot email list — that is, the (Orange) Bootniks!

People who subscribed to website updates are Bootniks too — we don’t want you to miss out on news and insider info (like the quite-possible-almost-for-sure Bread For The Holidays event.)  This means website subscribers *might* be getting some updates twice, from the website and the Bootnik list.   If this happens often and it bothers you, fire me an email and I’ll fix things up for you.

One More Thing

I almost forgot — if you’re not signed up to our Orange Bootnik list yet, now’s the time!  Be the first person on your street to learn about when we finally open the best Artisan Bread bakery in Regina.   Either use the box in the upper right corner of the website or click this link.  Your neighbours will think you’re way cool!

Photo by tannazie

Although I’ve spoken to a great many of our friends and customers over the past year, I haven’t posted to the site in a very long time.  This has caused a bit of worry with people who discovered the website and thought they missed out on some fun (and great bread.)  I get a couple emails a month from people asking if we’re still baking.

Are we still baking in the brick oven? Yes and No.  We’ve done a few bakes for special occasions, but we’re not baking on a regular schedule.

Are we going to open a full time bakery? Very good question!  It looks like…YES!

We still have a lot of work to do, not least of which is settling on a location.  But we’re working hard at it — picking a location, sourcing equipment, getting the financing in place, etc.  I think we have the dominos lined up so that once we settle on the location, the rest can fall pretty quickly.

Our dream site at the River Heights Mall fell through back in May — the landlord has other plans for the mall that doesn’t include world class bread and baked goods  If you feel differently, perhaps you can tell him   But you know, once that option officially died it actually opened up some new ideas for us.  I guess we were stuck on one place so much that we couldn’t see the opportunity in other sites.

We’ve also been talking with other bakers.   Second generation bakers and rookies who have been open less than a year.  So we’re feeling much more confident that we can be open and baking for you before I need to post a Summer 2010 update.

In the meantime, please drop us a line if you want to chat, either with a comment on the website or via email.  Words of encouragement are welcome, as is a kick in the pants once in a while — your choice!