- Hello Tasty, I'm David.
- And I'm Andrea, and this is the very, very
crazy story of how we turn our apartment into a.
- [David] Popular bakery in the middle of a pandemic.
- Yeah.
We moved to Mexico City, because I had a residency
and a district residency here.
- I organized exhibitions, I'm a curator, and I also write.
- I had a residency in Switzerland and David
has some project in Portland.
- And all of a sudden the pandemic strikes
and we don't really know what to do.
We were just like in awe sitting at home, missing the gigs
but also the money that we needed to live.
It went away with those gigs being canceled.
- We had like this Pinterest board that was called
Cuarentena Baking, Cuarentena Baking is a Spanglish thing.
It's like quarantine baking.
- The thing is, we don't even have an oven
because our apartment doesn't have an oven.
We just like went online and pay by card
and very small Hamilton Beach oven.
- [Andrea] A toaster oven for two slices.
- Yeah, we decided to just give it a shot
and a few recipes that we wanted to do and an exchange
with friends, because we were just like trying out recipe.
So we were just begin sending it to friends
and like posting online and some people start to notice it
and they ask us if we sell it.
And we're like, no, we're not doing this for money.
And then it starts happening more and more.
And we're like, are we selling?
It becomes a hit and we don't know when that started
to happen, like all of the sudden we had a menu
that we came up with like from the top of our heads.
- Everybody asked like how did it start?
What did you do to become some famous?
We have no idea.
- Yeah.
(light hearted guitar music)
So this is our workspace, which is originally a bedroom
but that's what we have.
- [Andrea] Basically the whole apartment
is one very big kitchen.
We've kind of adapted some of the boxes
so that they are shelves for more ingredients.
- A typical week for us starts on Tuesday
when we begin prepping for the our brownie special
that we do on Wednesday.
- So we do a dulce de leche blondie,
a kinder nutella blondie, a s'mores blondie,
and for brownies we do salted caramel and nutella brownie.
We start by browning the butter and this is really important
because it gives them a sort of caramelized flavor.
- Melting the chocolate, we usually mix two different kinds
of chocolate that we put with the butter.
After it's melted, we put it on a on a mixer
with the sugars, we also use brown sugar and white sugar.
And then we add the eggs.
We mix it up very, very well.
And then we add salt and vanilla
and then we'd finish off with our flour
but also with cocoa powder and we put it on a tray.
And then from there they can become either caramel
or Nutella brownies.
We did a lot of prepping today but we're nowhere near ready.
There's a lot of baking that needs to happen tomorrow.
People are going to be arriving quite soon in the afternoon.
So we have to get up quite early
and bust our (beeps) off.
- [Andrea] Instagram is exploding a little bit
so we need to organize orders for tomorrow.
- We have yet to put a order system in place.
We do everything manually, it is a nightmare.
- [Andrea] It's 10:30, we're very tired,
we are already in bed and we are ordering
some supplies for tomorrow.
Like a ton of of chocolates.
- [David] We're also in a pandemic so we are afraid
to go to central markets to get the product.
- It was supposed to be a quiet day, but it was a bit crazy.
- There's no such thing as a quiet day.
(Andrea laughs)
(quick strings plays)
- It is 6:30 AM.
We're trying to wake up.
We had to wake up very early today
because we need to start baking.
It's a bit messy but you know, remember it's a home project.
- [David] This is our setup for brownies and blondies
for the morning except for the ones that we baked yesterday.
- So for the dulce de leche blondies, we start by browning
the butter because it gives them caramelized flavor
and then we mix that with the sugars.
We use both the white and brown sugars.
Then we mixed that really well until it forms this sort
paste and the sugar kind of melts a little bit.
And then we add in the vanilla and the eggs, then
when that's very well incorporated,
we add in our flour, salts and that is it.
It's a, it's a very basic recipe, but it is,
it's just all about the baking times and the mixing.
We had around 160 grams of dulce de leche per batch.
- [David] Okay so, off we go.
- [Andrea] We have to bake for like 10 hours straight
so that we can make our blondie batches for the day.
- A number of friends come over to help us.
They're all artists who are jobless like us.
So two of them, Paulo and Julie, usually come on Wednesdays
and they help us out with the frenzy of cooking, baking
and at the same time taking orders, delivering.
- Okay, so the brownies and blondies are not done yet.
And we have not a single box
but we have an interview with Telemundo right now.
So that makes our day a lot more complicated.
It is amazing that so many people are interested
in what we are doing.
- [David] So this is for our popup on Saturday.
So we're working with a place called Querencia.
- [Andrea] They sell flowers and plants,
it's a really beautiful shop.
So I think we're done with the flyer now
and we'll get back to cakes.
- So it's almost 2pm and things will get out of control
real fast because it'll be a number of people
looking for their order.
- We have started packing, but we will probably keep on
packing when the clients are coming.
And now everybody is starting to arrive.
We are running around trying to deliver
to hand in our orders.
And sometimes you go downstairs to hand them something
and there's already more people there
and we have to run upstairs, finish baking,
take something out of the oven.
(David and a woman speak a foreign language)
And then run downstairs with new orders and so on.
- Pretty much every time, yeah.
- We also have to organize tomorrow
and making everything for the pop up.
So tomorrow and Friday are very crazy days.
And today is our chance to organize that.
So this is it for today.
- [David] So it's Thursday morning.
It gets progressively difficult to get up in the morning.
- I am very behind on social media.
We get tons of messages and yesterday was a bit crazy so.
We have orders, we have messages of people asking questions.
They want to know which flavors we have,
they want to know our menu, they want to know where
the pop-up will be so I am very behind.
We also get very nice comments like people just
writing to say, hey, what you're doing is amazing.
We love you, thank you and those are great.
(upbeat guitar music begins)
- This is like a seven ingredient recipe.
- [Andrea] David is coming in with some
(speaks a foreign language) and we are also making
a carrot puree.
We are doing a carrot cake
and this is just nut cookie and butter
which add a lot of crumbs on top
and it's really nice because it blends well.
So we are making this sort of caramel brookie
and now we're rolling the cookie in cinnamon sugar.
Okay, we are done with the cake for today.
- Morning, we are decaying as we go.
(Andrea laughs)
- [Andrea] And we still have the worst day ahead of us.
- [David] Like 14, 15 hours of baking.
- [Andrea] This is the farthest pop-up we've ever done.
We have never gone that far.
We are usually at locations
very close to where we're working at, so I am very nervous
to see how it works out, to see how many people show up.
If someone shows up.
We don't really know how many people know about us there.
I don't know if it's going to be 10 people or 200, you know?
- [David] And we could also get, you know
like rain and then nobody wants to come then we're screwed.
- [Andrea] We were making the carrots, spice,
dulce de leche, la touse cake jars.
And this is our tres leches, berries cake jar.
So the apartment looks like this right now.
This is our living room, David in the kitchen,
and everything is a bit of a mess.
We have some boxes there.
12:30 at night, our kitchen is a huge mess.
- It's almost 1:00 AM and we will try to sleep
for about four hours and then we will try to crawl out
of bed for half an hour, and then we'll begin baking again.
(dramatic horn music)
For the popup, it's a thing that we really like
because it's a moment that we have contact with people.
We actually see human beings,
and this is the only opportunity that we have
to actually, you know, interact with people
and is our major selling day, also.
We're going to take our tables, create our train
that we made for this.
We usually try to do more products that we don't have
when we do our midweek specials.
Cake jars which are a major thing because people
love cake jars, we also do special cookies,
you can have brownies by the piece which you can not
buy from us during the week and then we do
a burned cheesecake and we top it off with of course
dulce de leche and cookies and people are crazy about it.
- [Andrea] It's really good.
- We don't know what's going to happen,
we don't know exactly what we want to do.
We know that we want to keep on going.
- Yes, we don't want like a huge project.
We don't want to be everywhere, we want to keep it simple.
We want to keep it close to people, we want to continue
like these sort of home made things, we like the pop-ups.
We like to kind of travel and reach a lot of places.
So we're thinking about, for example, popups
in all of Mexico and not only Mexico City.
So, you know, Monterey, Guadalajara, Vera Cruz.
I never knew that I could work this hard
for so long and for so many days in a row.
It has really put us to the test.
- [David] Yeah, it's definitely a challenge
because it's not only, you have to be in your home 24/7
because of the pandemic, but you also have to work
with your couple but we have pulled through
so it's a very nice thing to discover.
- We don't know how to express how grateful we are
how happy we are with this.
Thank you for watching, thank you so, so much
for all of your support for just being there.
- And we'll see you soon.
- [Man] Oh, yes.
(hopeful light rock)