Three Layer Cake

Sweet Jazmines:  Serving Philly's Best Cheesecake

(see Kim's Tips for making Perfect Cheesecake on Page 3) 

It has to taste as good as it looks.  This is the philosophy of Sweet Jazmines Bakery, Philadelphia’s premier address for cheesecake and desserts still made the way grandma used to make them.  The owner of Sweet Jazmines Bakery is CIA graduate Kimberly Davis Cuthbert.  Kim’s story is as enchanting and inspiring as she is, and as the awards her bakery has won reflect, so are her desserts.  From just two years after opening, Sweet Jazmines has been consistently named among Philadelphia Magazine’s and Main Line Magazine’s “Best Of Philly” For Cheesecake and Custom Desserts. 

Talking with Kim was like talking with a sister, no puns intended.  She’s funny, candid, caring, and determined.  She talks about her work and her bakery as though they were living beings.  She cares for her customers as though they were close friends.  Her happy memories of food with her family translate into her approach to baking:  everything is made from scratch, using eggs, butter, flour, sugar, and natural ingredients, like the cakes you make in your own kitchen.  “For me that’s a dying breed because a lot of people aren’t able to because of the margins or for whatever reason, but for me it’s important to keep that genuineness.  We’re not organic, but we insist on pure ingredients,” she said.  She keeps it real. 

The genuine concern she has for pleasing her clientele also comes through in the thoughtful way she discusses the range of desserts she offers and the time she spends with her special order clients, often for wedding cakes.  Along with cake advice, she also gives a bit of premarital counseling as well, “This is your day, one of the most important of your life, and you should be happy on it.  Take the time to relax and enjoy the preparations.  Don’t let the stress get you!” 

Kim’s background in accounting proved to be as successful a combination with an Associates of Occupational Studies in Baking and Pastry Arts from the Culinary Institute of America, as the combination of bananas and rum in her Bananas Foster cheesecake, her best-selling dessert.  Starting with a small business loan and the determination to turn her passion into a career, she opened Sweet Jazmines in 1999.  She knew when she did that it would not be a get-rich-quick venture, and that the work would be hard and the hours long.  She was quite myopic:  Her focus was being able to love going to work every day, not making a killing.  Even now that her restaurant registers an increase in its profit each year (which is reinvested in the business), when she talks to students about her profession, she warns them that if they are looking to make big bucks, they should look elsewhere.  Opening a bakery is not something you do for money, but you do for passion.  Yes, you can make a living, and it depends on how much money you need to be happy, she explains.  But there is more money in other things, she concludes. 

Her approach to baking is a bit like “the little black dress”.  She believes in having a few solid bases, like her basic pound cake, upon which you can build layers of complexity.  Sometimes the flavor combinations come to her out of the blue, and sometimes it’s a studied approach.  “We have these ‘more than just brownies’ that have ganache filling, that took months and months of figuring out how to get the filling in without it sinking to the bottom.  It was a long process, with a lot of product wasted to get it just right,” she explained.  For this reason she carefully guards the recipes (DRATS!).  Often her staff helps vet the recipes, and her husband provides feedback as well.  He was pleasantly surprised when he learned that the lemon, blueberry, white chocolate pound cake was her best seller among cakes.  He just didn’t see the combination working out!  To make sure that Sweet Jazmines stays current, she keeps her finger on the pulse of dessert trends through her contacts at cooking schools, like Johnson & Wales, and she consults magazines.  She also monitors client comments and sales to understand how her flavors are going over.  “Some flavors don’t translate well across neighborhoods.  You may find that one flavor combination will go well for one segment of the population, but not another.” 

Kim is happy with where she has brought Sweet Jazmines over the past seven years.  Originally only a made-to-order bakery, she now offers many products daily to walk-ins.  She would like to diversify her clientele and to add larger supply outlets, like Starbuck’s, but she has no complaints with where she is.  In between keeping up with her 3 ½ year old son, she has also started to write a cookbook, which will hopefully be as successful as her cheesecakes! 

If you’re ever in the Philadelphia area, drop by the bakery, have a dessert, and a chat.  You won’t regret it!

Sweet Jazmines/your personal baking philosophy:  What you want each person who sees/purchases one of your creations to know about you, the story they will tell to their friends who admire the dessert? 

My baking philosophy is “it has to taste as good as it looks.”  Pure and simple.  In terms of tasting, in my shop we like to get back to the basics of food really tasting in its pure form so that it’s not so over manipulated.  We use basic ingredients, we bake from scratch. 

The Culinary Institute of America helped you most with what aspect of your culinary career?
I think the most it helped with was, as their magazine says, Mise en Place:  teaching that there’s a proper order in which things have to be done and to be organized.  Being in a kitchen with other people sharing space, efficiency, time is money.  The longer it takes, there’s a big difference.  10 hours vs. 4 hours...  Like I tell my staff: “You need to make it look like it took 20 hours but you need to get it done in 5.”

They also gave us the discipline.  Certainly there are many many chefs without formal training, their training is in the kitchen and they are amazing chefs, so I don’t think it’s necessary to go to school, but it can teach discipline. 

Which of your accomplishments has brought you the most satisfaction?
We’ve gotten a lot of awards and been on Food TV, but I would honestly say that it is when my husband, Chris, was diagnosed with cancer and I was still able to keep the business going with only one other person working for me and still be there for my husband. I went to most of his chemotherapy sessions. That experience only made us stronger as business partners, husband and wife and friends.  We figured if he, we can beat cancer, running a successful business should be within our sight. During this time I found out I was pregnant, also. I learned to decorate with Jordan, my son, on me. Keeping the business afloat with all of those things happening to me and my family was an incredible accomplishment. 

How do you work through your ideas for a new dessert beginning to end?  Do you discuss the flavors first with someone else, do you just test it?   There was a bakery in Philadelphia where we always went as a child that had the most amazing butter cookies that melted in my mouth.  I had a mission to recreate those, that's what I'm eating now.  A lot of it is recreating your memories.  For example, we just started experimenting with chocolate frozen cheesecake.  That just kind of came out of my head…Chocolate and banana go well together…  Sometimes we have an idea and we think it’s original and then find out it’s not.  Sometimes I imagine it, sometimes I see something that works.  Sometimes I bring my staff in and we talk about it and test it.  

What has been the biggest challenge with Sweet Jazmines?
Probably from a financial stand point.  Our marketing.  How to figure out how to grow the business now that we have the product.  How do we get to the masses?  The challenge has been how to come up with a marketing and promotional campaign and find the time when you’re trying to do a lot of it yourself. 

Having a Jazz Café is a dream of yours.  How does music influence your sweet creations?
When it’s 2,00 in the morning and I need some inspiration to keep me going and I’m by myself, I can turn the music up and it relaxes me, it’s like something comes over me and I relax.  Some of the tension leaves my body.  When I had my son with me here, I used to dance with him in the cradle.  It’s fun in the kitchen, because it’s so rhythmic, you’ll find the noises and timing make it more friendly.  Some kitchens don’t allow music, but that’s my personality, and I want it to come through. 

Your best selling dessert?
I would probably have to say our Bananas Foster cheesecake.  A Banana Cake with homemade caramel infused with rum.