A day in the life of Banar Designs

Abbie checks the day's schedule.

Jeri brings in the " hockey-puck" cake. The recipes from England don't always work out. Must be something in the translation!

Jeri redid the recipe and made this beautiful cake.

Nancy walks Tootie and the neighbor's dog, Crispie after lunch. An everyday ritual. Tootie starts barking right after we put the last bite of lunch in our mouths to tell us it's time for her walk.

Jodi improves the look of the green tomato pie in the photo studio.

One of the photographs. Helen's Tropical Custard.

The beautiful end of the day.

Tuesday is a full day of photography. The cooks bring their food in. I get the settings ready.
Steve sets up the lights. Each of the four food shots take about 2 hours of primping the food and taking lots of different shots. Then the cooks have to have their hands photographed doing one of the steps of the preparation of the food.

Before photography day, I do a layout which has to be approved by the client and props and color schemes are chosen. The cooks have all presented three variations of a recipe to have one of them chosen by the client. These cooks are called "developers". They do an amazing job of making the food taste good and look good. They're Jodi, Vickie, and Helen. Rachel is going to be joining them. ( She's Jodi's daughter and has learned a lot from her mother.)

Nancy has to write up all the recipes according to the specifications of the client, make them fit the templates, make sure all the measurements have been converted from the foreign ones and much much more. Also lots of proofreading which I help with. There are 12 recipes per week.

Susan, the copywriter, writes the very creative captions that go with the cover photos.

Steve does all the beautiful photography and all the complicated computer work. He's a genius.

There are also several " tester" cooks who cook all the foreign recipes to make sure that they work. They also do measurement converting and have to type the recipe into a template. No easy job. They do it wonderfully. They're Jennifer, Jeri, Judy, Nicki, Sarah and Rachel.

There's lots more to be added later.