It has been an interesting year and perhaps more importantly. a challenging one. It is not easy to stop being creative in our business, there are always new foods you want to put on your cafe menu, new cookies and cakes to add to an already big selection of bakery sweets.  In a tight economy one must watch everything closely.

Having said that, we are ever so anxious to put new things in our production line. Some items  we added in 2010 were our panini sandwiches, the Opera cake, the tiramisu cake, and a new selection of cookies.   Luckily they all turned out to be successful. The 2010 holiday season was  a big success, our Christmas selection was popular and we had a hard time  keeping up with our specialty holiday cookie production. Customers especially loved the different way we decorated our Yule Logs this year and we even made a mini size one which was very popular. We have changes in the making for 2011 that are very exciting. Specifically we will start making new cookies in addition to our standards.  Our first new cookie will be “chocolate hazelnut delight”, a densely chocolate cookie dough made of our cut off chocolate cake pieces, rum and pistachios and  dipped in chocolate ganache, and yes you might even love them ! They will come and go according to their popularity, so come in and taste them. We are calling this our “cookieliscious” line.

In addition, our cafe menu will see a few changes as well. Mainly we will have our our version of  German/Austrian dishes back on the menu along with a few new items. Samples of the new items will be Schnitzel with potatoes, sauerkraut and red cabbage, Wieners with rye bread and mustard, Bratwurst with potatoes, red cabbage and sauerkraut, goulash suppe, and chicken schnitzel salad. We will start carrying German style cold cuts that are all made by the premium quality sausage makers Saag’s from the bay area. These can be bought by the pound along with our salads in our deli case.  As always we continue to do our share of wedding cakes, as 2010 was a record year for weddings.

We are proud to be celebrating our 31st year in business, and as always, we work hard to bring our customers the best tasting bakery goods and food from our kitchens. We are grateful to be voted Reno’s Best year after year, it is the biggest compliment we receive  from our loyal following in the Reno and surrounding areas.  We are looking forward to sharing all these items with you.  We invite you to come and see our bakery with all the wonderful sweets we bake daily or come to our cozy cafe where we serve fresh made foods every day from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.  Josef’s is the place you can come  to sit and have a delicious cup of coffee with a pastry, a full breakfast,  a cup of soup with a fresh baked french roll, a deliciously prepared lunch, or just to sit and enjoy the company of a friend over a hot cappuccino with a luscious chocolate eclair.

We are in the midst of our busy wedding cake season and loving it. We’ve taken on many challenging cake designs and between myself and my new decorator/assistant Lia we’ve met each challenge successfully. This week we did a wedding for an Indian couple who chose to have a cake on each guest table. The cake is square with a red fondant icing and decorated with a gold band and all gold details and topped with a fresh red rose, it is truly beautiful. The other challenge we had was a cake with a lotus theme, a lotus as a cake top as well as on the sides of the cakes, with blue water painted as a background, again we are so happy with how it turned out. We welcome and love these challenges and take great time and pride in making it the perfect cake for the brides and grooms who celebrated this very special day. We have lots more cakes between now and october, and we look forward to doing them ! Pics of these cakes will be posted on FLCKR for you to see.

Did you know that Mother’s Day is the busiest cafe day at Josef’s, and the biggest grossing celebration for most restaurants?? We sure know it. Every year it gets bigger and bigger for us and this year we have decided to make it a two day event, celebrating it both saturday and sunday, May 8 and 9. We cannot accomodate this special day on one day only, so we are giving you a chance to choose the day that is most convenient for you. As always we will have a special menu and a goodie for all Moms. Our bakery will have hand decorated cookies for Mom that will make the perfect sweet gift you can give to all the Moms in your life. Over time we have noticed that our customers give treats to other women (besides their own moms) they appreciate from our bakery. So come in and see our little cakes and cookies specially decorated for Mom’s day.

You can make your reservations ahead by calling Cintia in our cafe to insure a table for this busy weekend.

We’ve noticed lately that we are getting many new folks coming to our bakery and cafe. In these economic times we feel fortunate….. As we have in years past, our bakers still get up very early in the morning to start baking our breads and morning buns for our 8 A.M. opening. The kitchen cooks come in at 7 A.M. to ready the kitchen for the breakfast crowd we have each day, our cafe staff starts the coffees, set out our fresh baked morning pastries, for you to come in and enjoy. We’ve done this for almost 30 years and we still love doing it. So thank you Reno residents for making us your place to have a little sweet, fresh made eggs, strong black coffee, fresh baked french breads, and everything you have loved having at Josef’s. It’s been very rewarding for us and we love that our hard work and commitment to making good food and sweets, is appreciated by you coming to Josef’s all these years. Thanks a whole lot ! from all of us at Josef’s Bakery and Cafe.

As usual each holiday or family occasion is marked by our special decorated cookies, cupcakes, petit fours and cakes. Easter is our pink, purples, and yellow season when everything we decorate reflects these easter colors. So come in and find things to fill your easter baskets with, bunnies, carrots, chicks, and more. As always we have been making the very traditional hot cross buns, which our customers have loved year after year.

We had a fabulous Valentine season, customers loved that everything was hearts in pinks and reds. Thank you always for including us on your Love Holiday.

In addition to the easter sweets, we will have our 15th annual EASTER BRUNCH. We have really done some new things with our special menu for April 4th, Easter Sunday.
Bring in the family for a wonderful brunch, as always, you will be having our delicious and traditional hot cross buns – who makes them anymore in Reno but Josef’s. Come early as we get quite busy, we are serving our Easter Brunch from 8 AM to 3PM on Sunday April 4th.

Hello!  We hope that everyone had a fantastic holiday season. We certainly had an excellent holiday here thanks to our wonderful and loyal customers…we are forever grateful! We are 12 days into 2010 and it looks to be promising year! We have big things planned–new additions to the cafe menu, new products in the bakery, not to mention all those sweet treats and confections for Valentine’s day!

Valentine’s Day is a holiday of expressing love and joy to all of the people that mean the world to you! It should come as no surprise that we think some of the best gifts are sweet and edible. Our ever-popular sugar cookies–in whimsical shapes and decorated with sparkling sugar and piped fancifully with royal icing–are the perfect valentine. We can even customize our jumbo-cookies with any inscription and color choices you would like! Just be sure to get your orders in early! We also have an array of our adorable petit-fours all decorated  to celebrate the loveliest holiday of the year.

Like I mentioned before, we have big things planned for 2010, so be sure to stop by the store or the website to see what’s new for yourself!

We are finishing (writing this Christmas Eve at 10:30 AM) our 29th year of holiday baking and appreciating the tremendous response we had from this community inspite the economic atmosphere.  It is still affordable to give people hand baked goods at times like this, and you’ve proved that again this year.  We are grateful for your business – always and always !  And so another year comes to an end at Josef’s and hopefully we’ve made the times you came in a little “sweeter” with our bakery goodies and our cafe food.  We baked a lot of our traditional holiday sweets this year and added some.  Our hand decorated cookies were a big hit, from the itty bitty ones to the jumbo trees and snowman. All of them  were a huge hit with the kids and a great gift giving item.  Our traditional Holiday Stollen and Buche de Noel (yule log) were,  as always,  a great hit.  We baked the old standby holiday desserts with new ones and our customers have  been very happy with our selection this year.

From all the bakers, the cooks, the line cooks, the sales and wait staff, we want to thank you for your support this year and wish you a fabulous and prosperous New Year.  We love what we do, and will continue to do our best for you always and in the year to come.

You’re probably laughing when you read the above – ok! ok!   We want to launch our doggie cookies and what could be a better way to do this?  Our outside patio seating area has long been pooch friendly and  pooch owners tend to be very engaging with each other when they sit & eat outside our cafe with their favorite doggie!   We’ve always wanted to do doggie cookies for your pooch, and though we have done our famous hand decorated cookies in the shapes of dogs and bones,  they were  for you,  not your pooch!  So now we will make cookies for your dog and will start it off by having a contest for the best halloween costumed dog – yours.  All you have to do is (1) come to our store on October 31 at 1pm  (2) dress you dog to the nines in a costume  (3) parade him/her around the sidewalks of our shopping center (4) when judging time comes, walk in front of the judge’s tables, no tricks necessary, just look good.   (5) get a free doggie cookie (6) and if your pooch is irresistably cute, win a gift certificate for you to use in our store.

Simple !  Each dog who enters the contest will get a free cookie, you can win a gift certificate for $25 (we’ll pick the top three) and just come back again and again to Josef’s, but now for both yourself and your little four legged buddy!  Remember the more original the costume, the more likely you can win !

Thanks as always, we work hard to bring you the best products and we love doing it too!  Thirty years and still going strong.  We always believed in this community appreciating quality baking when we started in 1981, then we grew and grew and added our cafe and restaurant.  Today we serve a full breakfast and lunch menu and still get up in the wee hours of the morning and bake our beautiful pastries and delicious breads for our  loyal customers to wake up to.  Our kitchen as our bakery, cooks all our foods from scratch and make it to order.  It helps that we have never gotten tired of this business, it is endlessly creative and always rewarding when customers compliment us on our foods and baked goods. Thanks again Reno and all other areas for loving us !

The last time I wrote, it was the end of May, and we all thought that the weather was on the verge of getting very, very hot. So here I am, it’s June 17th, and it’s just barely getting into the 80′s. June 2009 is trying its’ very best to set a record. We saw so many days in a row of measurable precipitation, and I saw on the news last week that it’s the fourth highest amount of rainfall in the month of June! I really don’t mind it, it keeps it cooler in our shop!

June is generally the most popular month for weddings, though this year, it seems like most of my brides aren’t booked until August, and then the weddings continue into the fall. Brides these days are definitely on a tight string too. But there are a lot of things we can do to accomodate almost any budget. Terri Russell of News Channel 8 did a story about cutting back your numbers for your nuptials:

Getting Hitched for Less

I was told by two newscasters this week that when they think of Reno bakeries, their first thought is always Josef’s! We are so grateful for that. There is another news story this week, different channel, different writer, that I will be sure to include a link to as soon as it airs!

Stay Cool out there!