Designing for Life Center

B's cafe has been closed down because her sous chef left her and she is too busy running the lebanese restaurant and the yoga school. The cafe has been a silent space for over 2 months now and as a diehard pastry chef, she feels heartbroken that her dream of having her own little bakery dashed.

We talked one day about reviving it somehow, but concluded that it doesn't work as a pastry / coffee shop because it does not make money. The investment in her kitchen however was massive with a fully commerical equipment like stainless steel commerical ovens, shelves, tables and mixers. Letting it sit in the dark was a complete travesty.

So we are going to start the Life Center Bake School. She or any other teachers will use the space to pass on baking secrets and I will organize the set up ie designing of the programmes, brochures, marketing, and assist in the kitchen during classes.

I started poking around and found no such classes within Ampang which is a great start. There are however some schools that are really established with celebrity cooks and slick websites. The common thread among these competitiors, was that classes were mostly watch and learn. Hands on classes were few and far apart and very expensive.

That set the stage for our school - purely hands on classes and commercial kitchen equipment. We printed out a brochure and left it on the counter and there has been some excitement among the ladies who come to LC also for yoga lessons.


This is the front cover of the brochure with the programme inside. We haven't had any calls to book the classes yet but fingers crossed.

The class programme so far is :

Velvety Cakes Class
Wild Berries Genoise &
Valhorna Chocolate Ganache.

Trio of Doughnuts
Savoury doughnuts with spicy meat filling
Chocolate Glazed with Crushed Nut topping
Fresh pastry cream filled Doughnuts

Each class is RM 250 and students make everything from scratch and take it all home. Reasonable?

Playing with design software became a hobby. Adobe is a powerful tool and learning it has been tough but I managed to do some simple things. I am trying to sign up for Adobe classes to learn to use my software properly, in fact there is a graphic design correspondence course I might take.

Anyway, B has also asked me to help to redo their restaurant express lunch menu and the new year eve dinner brochure. I played around and got these.


and this


Will do some more and show you guys, the next project is to revamp her menu which will require more work. For now, I need to get some inspiration. Seen any good menus lately ?