We would like to welcome you back with our first post to Duchess Blog after a very long hiatus. What a whirlwind this past year has been for the Duchess family—a move, two new businesses, and expansions across the board—we are just now catching our breath!
Last summer, our kitchen & baking supply shop Duchess Provisions moved into Holland Plaza, growing to four times its original size. This allowed us to bring in some exciting new product lines, AND to venture into the world of baking classes.
Inside Duchess Provisions's new location
Attached to our new Provisions space is the teaching kitchen we always dreamed about, Duchess Atelier. Over the last six months, we have been offering classes on everything pastry—macarons, pie, tarts, cake, chocolate—all the things Duchess is known for. It has been a huge challenge, with owners Giselle and Jacob teaching most of the classes themselves, but the rewards have been great as well. We have had the opportunity to work one on one with our customers, to find out what they love about baking, and to share our some of our tried and true recipes. By the spring of 2017 we will have had 1000 students pass through our doors. We can’t thank our customers enough for your overwhelming support, your patience in the face of a lineup, and most of all, your enthusiasm to share our passion for baking!
Our new teaching kitchen Duchess Atelier
We hope that through this blog we can give you all a closer look at what we do—behind the scenes stories and photos, recipes, product features, and interviews with our staff and new sister restaurant Café Linnea. We also want to hear from you! We invite you to ask your burning questions, share your baking successes and failures, and suggest baking related topics that you would like to learn more about. We will watch the comments for your questions, but if you feel the need to send us an email, please direct them to info@duchessatelier.com.
For this first post we wanted to do a little ‘Year in Review’, sharing a few of the numbers from the Bake Shop kitchen that surprised us most as we took stock of 2016. We hope you enjoy and that you keep in touch!
