By Rich Bockmann
Southern-style sweet treats make any event orders of magnitude better, but nothing is as sweet as kicking up your feet and letting someone else sweat it out in the kitchen.
Take a Break & I’ll Bake is a start-up catering company working out of the Entrepreneurial Space business incubator in Long Island City, specializing in providing organizations with Dixieland desserts at wholesale prices.
“The whole concept behind what we’re doing is we want to be able to help out not-for-profits that just want to buy in bulk,” said Faith Osorio, a South Carolina transplant who started the business with her husband, Luis, last year.
The company provides orders of 100 or more pies, cakes and/or muffins to nonprofits looking to raise money through bake sales.
Osorio, who learned baking at her mother’s and grandmother’s sides, brought her family recipes along with her when she moved north more than a decade ago, and she said she found her Southern desserts to be a hit in a borough with so many different cuisines to choose from.
“I’ve always done Southern-style bakery dishes and brought them to events as opposed to bringing a bottle. We did a holiday bake sale and [Luis] went to his job and got 30 orders on his first day,” she said. “It was at that time we knew it was serious and there was no way to cook that food out of our home.”
Take a Break’s menu offers treats such as sweet-n-tasty potato pie ($20), pine dripping divine pineapple upside down cake ($28) and blueberry delight muffins ($15 for a batch of six). Since time needs to be reserved at the E-space kitchen, orders are required about two months in advance, and Osorio has a screening process to make sure a nonprofit can meet its sales quota to fulfill the order.
But Take a Break is not making its reputation on sales quotas and order fulfillments alone.
The baking biz took first place in the dessert category at the Queens Economic Development Corp.’s Queens Taste 2013 at Citi Field in May, where the judges raved about the pineapple upside down cake and cream cheese pies.
Osorio said her favorite dish is the rich and creamy cream cheese pie with either cherry or blueberry pie filling she learned to cook in her mother’s kitchen.
“The difference between my cream cheese pie as opposed to something like Junior’s cheesecake is that mine is not cooked in the oven. Mine is chilled in the refrigerator,” she said. “It’s very soft and light and not as heavy, but it’s rich in flavor.”
Take a Break also does catering for special events and outsources to restaurants, coffee shops and other eateries.
For more information, visit takeabreakcakes.com or call 917-270-7346.
Reach reporter Rich Bockmann by e-mail at rbockmann@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4574.
