We’ve all heard of Pinterest fails, I am sure many of you have a “board” of them. And those who don’t, have laughed at and shared someone else’s. Here at The 200Acres, we call that Research and Development! I had the awesome idea that we would have 25 pumpkin items in the bakery for our 25th Anniversary. Well, the girls in the bakery didn’t think it was so awesome in the beginning. It sounds a little daunting at first, but once we start brainstorming sessions, there is no stopping us. We have come to learn that there are good ideas, there are bad ideas, there are good ideas that are bad for us, or bad for us right now. The key is figuring out which is which.
Someone once mentioned to me, at an event in Springfield, that she had pumpkin bread with chocolate chips in it. Genius! I love chocolate chips and we love pumpkins and so our moist, delicious Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Bread was born. Easy as that. Then I started thinking, I still love chocolate chips and I like Pumpkin Angel Food Cake. We will just start making Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Angel Food Cake and it will be as good as our Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Bread and our Pumpkin Angel Food Cake. WRONG!!!! It was awful, just awful! It tasted horrible, it didn’t look very good and it even smelled a little weird.
A few weeks ago, we took an entire day and tried several different recipes. We had meetings before to prepare, we all brought our ideas and we went to town. We tried Pumpkin Donuts, Pumpkin Monkey Bread, Pumpkin Sticky Pecan Rolls, Pumpkin Delight Rolls . . . okay, so you get the idea. By the end of the day, we were all stuffed. We had a blast baking and gathering opinions from friends that stopped in to be guinea pigs, and we ended up with some great starts to new products. Not a bad day at work if you ask me.
We learned a fail is not always a complete fail either. Take our Pumpkin Monkey Bread for example. It tastes out of this world!! I mean it, it is sooooooo good! But the first one or two (or three) times we tried it, it did not look nearly as good as it tasted. It was falling out of the pan and oozing all over. So, back to the drawing board. We have to try it with less dough, smaller pieces, different pans- but no worries! We will get it. And you can taste the madness this fall.
We have more work to do and we have a few tweaks to recipes to make, but stay tuned because we will have some awesome, pumpkin-y, delicious new goodies for you to try this fall. And I promise, it WON’T be Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Angel Food Cake!!
Oh, and don’t think the bakery is the only one in the family that has “fails”. TGPP has had a few of their own, and I am going to share one of my favorites:
If you have been to our place before, you have surely seen one of our hundreds of hand-painted signs. We take great pride in them! There are some serious ones, some fun ones, and even some educational ones. Check out our Pinterest board “Everywhere A Sign” to see some of our favorites and then come out to The Patch and find them for yourself!
Most people would have just thrown this sign out once they realized they misspelled a VERY key word. One of our very creative sign painters decided to grab the bull by the horns and make it work. It is now one of our favorite signs!
As you can see, we’re not afraid of trying new things and pride ourselves on learning something from every success and “fail” and laughing and having fun along the way. We encourage creativity and enable opportunity– all in the name of The 200 Acres.
~Ginny
