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What a $4,375 Month Looks Like in My Home Microbakery | Episode 86

  • Jun 5, 2025
  • 6 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts


May was full. Not chaotic full, just packed, in the way May always is when you have kids in school. Spirit week, pajama day, teacher appreciation, graduation parties, Mother's Day, family birthdays, and every bit of it happening during the daytime while I still had dough days and bake days and a podcast to record.


I brought in $4,375 gross that month, which works out to about $1,000 a week. That was not my biggest month, and it was not supposed to be.


I share these monthly recaps with real numbers so you can look at a month like this and see the tradeoffs sitting underneath it. Here is what I ran, what I earned, what I cut, and the decisions underneath all of it.


The rhythm: two porch pickups and two markets

My month is built on a fixed schedule. Markets fall on the second and fourth Saturdays, and porch pickups land on Thursdays in the opposite weeks.


May had a fifth Thursday, so I did not bake for orders that week. That happens about quarterly, and when it does I take the week as a reset instead of adding a bake day. I rest, I test recipes, and I catch up on the errands and admin that have been sitting on the back burner.


If you are building a schedule for your own bakery, put that reset week in on purpose. A fifth week that appears on the calendar four times a year is free margin, and it only stays free if you refuse to fill it.


Simplicity kept selling

My first porch pickup was fairly standard: regular breads, two inclusion flavors, one scone flavor, and cookies. I kept the quantities at a level I could handle by myself.


For the second one I pulled way back to my core lineup only. Original loaf, sandwich bread, focaccia, cookies. No scones, no inclusion loaves, nothing extra.


Both of those weeks landed around $700 in sales.


That number is the whole lesson. I have offered the same core menu consistently for well over a year, and my customers know exactly what to expect from me. When I add the English muffins and the extras, my pre-order menu gets bigger and my average order goes up. When I do not have the capacity for extras, revenue dips a little and my people still show up.


So if you need to scale back this season, scale back. You will probably see it in your revenue, and your customers will still be there when you are ready to add things again. They will be thrilled when you do!


The words on the sign changed the sales

At my Mother's Day weekend market I brought brunch boxes. Brioche knots, muffins, and a mini chocolate loaf, priced right around $20. I did not bring many because I had no idea how they would sell.


I first labeled them on the little chalkboard marker on my table as Breakfast in Bed Boxes, and they sat there. Then I wrote them at the top of the easel sign in front of my booth as Mother's Day Brunch Boxes, and they started moving almost immediately. People walked in already asking whether I had any brunch boxes left.


I think Breakfast in Bed was too narrow. Most of the people buying were bringing the box to brunch somewhere, or gifting it. The new name made room for what they actually wanted to do with it.


Two things worth stealing from that:

  • Customers read your easel sign before they walk into your booth, so treat that sign as your menu, put the thing you most want to sell at the top of it, and cross items off as they sell out.

  • Name your products for the occasion the customer is buying for, not for the picture in your head.


The freezer system behind my muffins

I also brought individual blueberry muffins that market, and I prepped for it by mixing a batch 20 times my normal size, which is more than 20 dozen standard muffins.


Here is the process, since I get asked about it constantly:

  1. Mix all the liquid ingredients together. For a batch that big I use an immersion blender for the starter and eggs, then fold in the dry ingredients by hand.

  2. Refrigerate the batter overnight for a cold ferment.

  3. Scoop it with a two ounce scoop into jumbo tulip liners the next day.

  4. Freeze the filled pans until the muffins are solid, then transfer the pucks into a bin. As long as they are stacked neatly, the tulip liner holds its shape.

  5. On bake day, drop the frozen pucks back into muffin pans and bake as usual. Jumbo size needs about ten extra minutes.

This takes scooping off my bake day completely, and the muffins keep in the freezer for a month or more. Anything I can batch that far ahead is where my production time goes first.


What went wrong, because it always does

My oven stopped regulating its temperature at the second market and shot up to around 600 degrees, which scorched a batch of chocolate loaves. I turned it off, let it cool and reset, and it has not done it since.


A residential oven is not built to run at 450 for multiple hours at a time, week after week. Mine is being asked to do a job it was not designed for, and that is a real business risk, not just a bad afternoon. If you are running a home oven hard, plan for its replacement before it makes the decision for you.


I also burned a tray of muffins because I checked them, decided they needed a couple more minutes, and did not set a timer.


Both of those came straight off my market revenue, because I had counted that bread and those muffins in my planned quantities and then could not bring them.


Testing new products off a base recipe

I added blueberries to my regular English muffin recipe that month. Frozen berries brought a lot of extra liquid so I compensated with more flour, and I think fresh would do better. They came out soft, they were popular, and I want to build out a rotating set of flavored English muffins down the road.


When I develop a product I start from a base recipe I already know rather than starting from scratch. I can predict how the base is supposed to behave, so when the result comes out differently I know exactly what to adjust. It is faster, it is cheaper in ingredients, and it gives you a family of products instead of a pile of one-offs.


For the baker a few years in

Two shifts from May that scale well past a home kitchen:

  • I polled my customers about a year before this and was genuinely surprised that they wanted more sweet treats, the cinnamon rolls and the pastries, rather than more bread. Those sell out first every time they are on the menu. Poll yours about once a year and let the answers set your menu.

  • I reworked my market display around a rectangular cake tray with a clear cover and a wooden base. One of each pastry is visible on the tray, and the wrapped and labeled stock sits behind it. Less clutter on the table, a better look at what they are buying, and a booth that looks more professional.

Heading into summer I dropped porch pickups entirely and kept markets only. My bread quantity is capped by fridge space and mixer size no matter what I do, so the growth has to come from pastries, cookies, scones and pop-tarts that can be prepped ahead and stored in the freezer. Those bake off in bigger quantities, they sell individually as add-ons, and they lift the average order.


Final thoughts

May was steady growth by design. The trajectory of a bakery goes up and down and up again, and not every month is supposed to be a record.


What I care about more is that I came out of May energized instead of worn down. A month where you scale back, protect a reset week, and still bring in $1,000 a week is a month that built something!


Go look at your last month with that lens. Ask what you cut, what it cost you, and whether the trade was worth it.


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

If you like seeing the real numbers behind a microbakery, start here.


Links to things you might like!


 
 
 

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