Tara Ballard

Testing new pastries and desserts for service in order to maintain fresh, incising menus.

Responsible for all house made bread for restaurant and rooftop, including but not limited to sourdough foccacia, sourdough english muffins, brioche buger buns and hoagies.

Preparing, shaping and baking high quality breads, pastries, desserts and snacks for service.

Keeping track of inventory

Transported, set up and disassembled food service stations and equipment per contract specifications.

Helped chefs prepare and present food to event guests with strong attention to detail and presentation expertise.

Prepared dishes for catering events.

Prepared, assembled and delivered weekly meal kits to houses around Durham and surrounding areas.

Maintained a clean and organized work area.

Overseeing daily operation including; making sure both stores are properly staffed, preparing a daily selection of baked goods.

Responsible for filling orders, coordinating with clients personalized orders, training new bakers on proper procedures, delegating orders and ensuring they are done correctly, maintaining inventory, contacting vendors with weekly orders, marketing and promoting the bakery to potential clients, researching and testing new product ideas .

Overseeing daily operations including; insuring all products were prepared upon opening and nothing ran out.

Delegating and training staff of five to twelve. Conducting interviews, hiring and firing. Overseeing all outgoing and incoming orders. All the production baking for our bakery, local stores/bakeries and for stores as far away as Bethel and Valdez. Including multiple sheet pans of different bars, hundreds of cookies, sweetbreads and cinnamon/ sticky buns. Setting up for lunch service for in-house and to-go orders and prepared orders.

Started a school lunch program for the daycare next door. Prepared lunches for 5-20 kids.

Coordinated all catering orders via email and phone. Worked with clients to build the best catered event for them. Made everything from small lunches to large dinner and wedding caterings, events from 20-400 people. Handled billing and payments. Personally created all of the catering menus and flyers from scratch

Supervised kitchen staff during the night shift

Preparing cakes, cookies, pastries, donuts, bread and other baked goods from scratch each day. Creating a fresh and exciting selection of treats for guests to enjoy. Keeping a par of baked goods to feed up to 300 guests. Striving to improve my skills and products as well as being creative with recipes and trying new ideas while incorporating customer feedback.