Stingy on the frosting

Isn’t the frosting what most people especially like about cake? Black China seems clueless about that.

Black China Bakery — located in Santa Cruz, California — is a bakery that makes vegan cakes which they deliver to select stores in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I’ve been a customer of Black China Bakery for many years, having bought their brownies every week over the years, their brownies were hit-and-miss. Even though the same woman made them each time customers were told, sometimes they were super wet and fudgy (a 10 on a scale of 1-10) and other times they were very cakey and smelled like Devil’s Food Cake. They were still good when cakey — which I don’t say about non-vegan brownies — but I never did understand how they could be baked drastically different even though the ingredients’ list was the same so supposedly it was the same formula. Or did the scaling (weighing of ingredients) get off in the production bakery rush? Or were they not baked for the same amount of time each bake? I also bought slices of their German Chocolate Cake when a local store was open and served slices on their dessert table. That store went out of business so no more German Chocolate Cake from them.

I recently bought three vegan cakes made by Black China Bakery at my local grocery store.

I ordered their German Chocolate Cake all three occasions, but the shopper got the wrong cake the second time and got a Chocolate Cake. (I was disgusted). The cake is different for the Chocolate Cake and the German Chocolate Cake, the latter being the better cake.

All three cakes were good, but the frosting was very skimpy on all three cakes which has led me to decide to not buy them again. So being skimpy j– to save $$ — has backfired on Black China, at least in my case. As I was telling my friend, I think most people “love frosting” and like lots of it, perhaps more than cake. I’m not that big on frosting. I like sort of an equal amount of frosting to match the cake. My friend described the frosting on these cakes as paper thin, especially on the sides. For the German Chocolate, the coconut and pecan frosting is the signature frosting or what makes a cake German’s Chocolate. The layer of coconut and pecan frosting was thin as well. Their frosting crew had to work to get the frosting so thin and not have the top and sides of the cake start peeling off. The frosting on the sides was thin. Only the minimal “deco” on the top provided anything that could be called a “generous” amount of frosting. The Chocolate Cake had no chocolate deco around the edge of the cake to balance it off like high-quality bakeries usually do. Other than a tacky buttercream flower — like what goes on wedding cakes — the cake was entirely bare. That’s Cheap.

I doubt that most people will bother to buy another BC cake after sampling the skimpy frosting on all of these cakes. At USD$25-27 per 8″ cake one expects an adequate amount of frosting. We did not feel that we got our money’s worth from these cakes due to the minimal frosting.

At this rate, I’m expecting Black China to go out of business soon. How many people will buy their cakes with skimpy frosting when as I said earlier, it’s the frosting that the sheeple go for more so than the cake. Well, these cakes are short on frosting. Their cakes are more the “you have to make your own frosting and add it to the cake” type. And when one is paying nearly USD$30.00 for the cake, who is going to do that?

But this is what many bakeries do. They start out good but as time go by they skimp and skimp hoping the customer won’t notice as they make more profits. Another bakery I used to support has gone the same route. When they started out, Judy’s Breadsticks were delicious, moist and chewy. Today they’re like eating dry, over-baked cardboard. Any complaints about them have gone ignored because they don’t care. Someone will still buy them.

Years ago I wrote to a local bakery complimenting them about their brownies and the signature Tahitian Vanilla Extract they used which was very prominent in the flavour of their brownies. After getting my letter, they removed the extract. Can you believe that? It’s true. Apparently the bakers were putting in too much vanilla extract — it was a mistake in the recipe — and the bakery manager ordered that they take out the extract altogether. I tasted no extract in the brownies after they got my letter. I wrote back and asked politely why they would do such a stupid thing of taking out of the recipe what made the brownies special. I stopped buying them.

Over the years, Black China have raised their prices in the name of “fuel costs are rising.” Well, when the fuel costs came back down, the BC prices did not lower accordingly. And over the years, they had several price hikes on their cakes in the name of “We are a Family Owned Bakery” — so what? — as if that’s to speak to the heart strings of the customer. Some families can be just as greedy as corporations.

Well, I’m quite a good baker myself — not bragging — so I’m going to come up with a vegan German Chocolate Cake that’s similar to theirs and not order any from BC in the future. Mine will have a generous amount of coconut/pecan frosting on it as well as a generous amount of chocolate frosting. I’m not into skimpy.