The bakery launched last week home baking kits, providing customers with all the ingredients and instructions to recreate its popular baked goods in their own kitchens.
The Prolific Oven, which closed in 2019, is back with home baking kits available for pickup and delivery. Photo via The Prolific Oven Facebook.
"One wonderful thing we are seeing since shelter in place is the dramatic increase in baking at home,” the owners wrote in an email announcement. "While it brings us great joy to see your baked goods on Instagram, it did make us miss baking, and miss being a part of your lives incredibly. That's why we are so, so excited to announce baking kits we'll be putting together to help each other get through these difficult times."
The first kits, for Prolific Oven's chocolate cake with chocolate icing and chocolate chip cookies, quickly sold out. The bakery plans to replenish for next week, in time for Mother's Day on May 10, with additional kits to make either rum or mocha cream cheese icing for the chocolate cake, said Regina Chan. Chan's parents, Henry and Sophia Chan, bought The Prolific Oven at 550 Waverley St. from Harriet Spier in 1996. The family closed the longtime bakery last August, citing a "severe" labor shortage and increasing cost of doing business in the Bay Area.
Regina Chan with a slice of chocolate cake in the original Prolific Oven location in downtown Palo Alto. Photo by Veronica Weber.
The baking kits will be available for pickup from the bakery's former Sunnyvale location (which now houses Chan's restaurant, TAP'T Beer & Kitchen) or can be delivered locally for orders more than $50. (For Mother's Day orders, pickup is available on May 7.) If there's more demand, they plan to expand pickup and delivery capacity, and will consider potentially shipping the kits.
For more information and to order the baking kits, go to prolific-oven.square.site. The website and Prolific Oven's Facebook will be updated when new kits go live.
