My Lifelong Love Affair with Bakeries

 

I’ve loved going inside bakeries all my life. When I walk through the doors, I know I’m going to walk out again with a sweet treat! I can walk past clothing stores and jewellery shops, but if there’s a candy shop or bakery on my path, I slow down and window shop. Oh, alright! I might do a little more than window shop. Bakeries with their jelly donuts, mocha horns, and danishes are irresistible to me. Ah, my lifelong love affair with bakeries!

BBB Bakery

When I was growing up in Cloverdale, back in the olden days before super grocery stores, we had a bakery on the main street, BBB Bakery. A husband and wife business and I often accompanied my mother here where she bought bread and dinner rolls. She probably bought other goodies too from time to time, but my mother regularly baked cakes, pies, and cookies at home. She bought special occasion cakes from bakeries and other items that she wouldn’t normally bake like donuts.

The couple who owned the bakery had a son, David, my age. He was there in the bakery with his parents one day when I came in with my mother, around age two. David decided he wanted to kiss me and I wasn’t having any of that and I ran out of the bakery. He ran after me and chased me around my car – with his mother in hot pursuit! Yikes! It couldn’t have been that traumatic for me because I kept going back to the bakery.

When I was about six, BBB Bakery relocated to the Guildford shopping mall about a twenty minute drive from Cloverdale. This was a very popular mall in the Greater Vancouver Area back in the sixties, and it grew tremendously in the early seventies. Guildford Mall is still very popular today! The remodel from outdoor plaza to indoor shopping mall included building across a major street, and opening many shops in the walkway. It was a good business decision for BBB Bakery and they remained there for about 30 years before selling their business. I’m not sure how much longer the new owners operated it at that location, but it’s been closed down for some time now.

Oly’s Bakery

My mother started shopping at Oly’s Bakery in the next town over, Langley, about a ten or fifteen minute drive from our house. Oly’s Bakery had amazing cakes. Every year for my birthday I’d get a cake from here. By the time I hit my teens we were always ordering a bikini cake from Oly’s for my birthday. It was purely by chance that I knew Oly’s made such a cake. We came in one day and the cake was in the display case waiting for the person who’d ordered it to pick it up. Looking back I suppose it was probably a cake for a bachelor party or maybe a birthday cake for a man. You might think a bikini cake is an odd choice for a teenage girl, but there’s strategy at play here. That bikini cake had huge mounds of buttercream icing on the boobs!

Oly’s also sold jelly donuts that I loved, and they sold Danishes that my mother loved. Not the individual handheld Danishes. These were huge square shaped Danishes that you get several servings out of.

I frequented Oly’s well into my adulthood, though the bikini cakes stopped when I was about 15. I’m not sure when they closed down, by 2008 I guess. One day I stopped by and just about every store in this little strip mall had closed down.

Grocery store bakeries

Overall, most grocery store bakeries aren’t too bad. Their inventory tends to run from cakes, cupcakes, muffins, cookies, pies, donuts, and danishes. A lot of their baked goodies are inside a bulk bin with tongs to serve yourself.

Occasionally I’ll buy a small cake or pie. I’m running into the problem of being a single who needs to cut back on sugar, so not ideal to keep in the house. It’s fine to grab a cupcake or a donut, or a cream filled pastry, but generally I keep on walking. If I really want a donut, I can go to Tim Hortons. And buy just one!

Certainly there’s no pressure to window shop the baked goods in a grocery store. The clerks are either too busy or too disinterested to offer assistance, so you don’t get bugged ogling the goodies.

Out of town bakeries

I suppose my saving grace that I don’t head to bakeries and pig out is because I’ve decided my favorite bakeries are a good day’s drive away from me. In Oregon!

The Depoe Baykery is on the Central Oregon Coast, In Depot Bay – how do you like the play on words for Baykery? It’s located on Highway 101 just north of the main drag in Depoe Bay, about 6 miles south of my favorite place to stay in Lincoln City, the wonderful Ester Lee Motel.

Just your typical old time bakery featuring breads, donuts, and cookies. Check out this blueberry fritter with a drizzle of chocolate glaze. Breakfast!

I took a bite out of it and then thought maybe I should take a picture! I bought another donut called Turtle Bismark, named after the chocolate bars. It’s like a Boston Cream donut, with caramel filling and topped with pecans. Why oh why didn’t I take a picture of it before I ate it too? I had that Turtle Bismark and strawberries for dinner. These two donuts cost me just over $3. Amazing! What it would do to my blood sugar and all my hard work at weight loss if the Depoe Baykery was closer to me.

Do you call them donuts or doughnuts? I prefer the shorter donut! But Voodoo Doughnuts in Portland, spells them the long way.

How about this voodoo doughnut I bought in Portland! This is a chocolate glazed jelly doughnut, decorated to look like a voodoo doll.

The other doughnut is the Old Dirty Bastard the clerk recommended to me. It’s a chocolate glazed doughnut topped with crushed Oreo cookies and peanut butter. It was OK, but it was no voodoo doll doughnut!

And you know – it’s OK to have treats on holidays. Then back to real life. No donuts for me for the rest of 2019! Bought in a bakery that is!

DIY

I do a lot of baking.

And a lot of freezing. You know how it is when you’re single. Can’t eat a batch of baked goodies all in one sitting!

The weekend is when I can bake a dozen or two muffins and get them into freezer bags. Oh, I might eat one after it’s cool enough. You know, the old taste test.

Same thing with baked donuts. Not fried. I bought donut pans so I can bake them. They freeze good too,

Even though I don’t make cookies as much as I used to, I switched to making more granola bars more often! I make at least one batch, if not two batches, of granola bars each month.

Even though I save money by baking goodies myself, I’m sad the kind of bakeries I liked when I was a kid have gone by the wayside. You know the type. Where you could window shop for half an hour and still struggle to make a selection. That bakery, aka baykery, exists in Depoe Bay, Oregon. 400 miles away. Sad. But good for my waistline, I suppose.

Today’s bakeries

These days bakeries are more specialized offering only one type of product: donuts, cupcakes, bagels, breads, or cookies. With many varieties of the one product they sell.

Did you know that bakeries might not actually “bake” the baked goods they have for sale? It never even occurred to me that bakeries aren’t selling products whipped up by the baker who starts work at 2 or 3 in the morning! Then I read Cynthia Baxter’s Murder with a Cherry on Top, where the lead character runs an ice cream shop and the competitor bakery across the street starts selling ice cream treats too. This novel is where I learned about wholesale bakeries that sell to retail bakeries. Yup, all those muffins and danishes and other goodies in the display case at your favorite bakery might not actually be baked on site. Disclosure: if you click the link, you’ll be taken to Amazon and if you buy the book, I’ll receive a small commission for the referral.

I have a lifelong love affair with bakeries, and struggle with portion control and willpower. If I tell myself I can only buy from my favorite bakeries, and if they’re located in Oregon, that works for me. At least for now.

In the meantime, I’ll do my own baking and freezing when it comes to goodies.