Hope you had a great long weekend and that your week is off to a beautiful start. We are excited to kick off the week with the addition of two new pastries to the online preorder menu for this weekend; one sweet and one savory.

Everyone here at the bakery had so much fun making our special heart-filled Valentine’s Day menu for you this past weekend. Hopefully it brought a little bit of extra love and joy to your holiday weekend.

We are excited to send some love your way this weekend with a heart-filled Valentine’s Day menu! We look forward to filling your hearts and bellies with these special items, available for online preorders this weekend only:

Hope your week is off to a great start. On our side, it’s been wonderful to be able to offer online preorders again. Thank you for jumping right back into that rhythm with us so seamlessly – it’s as if we never stopped!

More than ten years in and I didn’t expect to be pushing a cart around Cash & Carry and yet, here I am, at least once a week, doing just that.

In the early days of Bakeshop, we were still in a rental kitchen, too small to receive deliveries from most companies and not enough space to store cases of goods. So once all of the day’s production, baking and delivery had been completed, I would run round to various businesses gathering what I needed to make the business run.

I grew up body surfing the waves of Southern California. For whatever wild reason, my friends and I had so much fun letting the cresting waves suck us back, up and over the falls, where we would slam into the shallow water below. We’d stand up sputtering, wiping hair and sand away from our faces as we gleefully ran out to do it again. This was not the typical intent of wave riding. In actuality, the goal was to catch the face of the wave as it pushed you towards the shore gliding gracefully and rapidly over the water.

How are each of you? I hope well given the circumstances.

It has been a wild couple of weeks at the bakery. Over half of our staff has been out for various reasons. We are a small but mighty team of 11, including me, so with half a staff we are definitely feeling it! I'm sure some of you were surprised to see that we didn't have any walk-up pastries for sale this past weekend, but we were so short-staffed that we didn't even have a counter person available, Believe me, no one is more disappointed than I am.

Happy New Year! We hope you had a joyous holiday season, and that your year is off to a wonderful star. We are back in the bakery again full-time after our two week break, and are excited to start baking for you again this weekend.

Winter weather has certainly arrived! Hope you are all staying warm. Here at the bakery we are staying toasty by the oven as we take preorders for the last three days that we will be open for 2021:

As Hanukkah winds down, we find ourselves gearing up for our final celebration of the year, Christmas, which also happens to coincide with our 10th anniversary!

We are incredibly honored to have spent the last decade baking for you. Thank you so much to everyone who has supported us, especially these last two years. It’s been a challenging but most rewarding time, and we are eternally grateful for you all.

First I would like to thank each and every one of you for your Thanksgiving pie orders. We were truly honored to place your pie into your hands to bring to your holiday table. I know that the line was very long and we appreciate everyone’s patience and warm attitude. I was touched each time I saw someone turn to the person behind them in line to wish them a happy holiday or to start a convivial chat. The bakery had a small town village feel that gave great comfort after the upheaval of the last year and a half.

For the past few weeks, we have been steadily climbing towards our busiest week of the year….Thanksgiving! I think it’s fair to say that there is equal excitement and trepidation for what’s to come. As I’ve mentioned many times before, the rhythm and repetition of baking is my meditation, and nowhere is this more obvious than the work that it takes to make pies at the scale at which we do. However, even I am a little daunted!

This weekend’s menu is also not to be missed! For starters, we are making a new loaf cake combining two Bakeshop Favorites: Chocolate Pumpkin Marble Cake. We make the cake by swirling our Chocolate Espresso Cake batter with our Pumpkin Spice batter in a loaf pan, resulting in a perfect rich and tender cake that serves 6-8. The flavor is fantastic, and so are the colors!

Hope you all had a Happy Halloween! Can you believe it’s already November? Here at Bakeshop that means one thing: Thanksgiving preorders are officially open! This year we are offering:

Hope you’ve been staying warm and dry in all this wild weather. Luckily it seems the rain will clear just in time for Halloween this weekend! We have been busy getting into the Halloween spirit over here at the bakery, and have a few special treats on the menu to make your celebrations extra sweet.

Baking is the dance that calms me. The repetition of making the same product over and over again. The intense focus that it takes to act as a partner with a pastry to coax out its best qualities, reassessing what the pastry needs to reach its full potential and shifting gears accordingly.

The arrival of fall is a welcome time here at the bakery to refresh the menu with seasonal offerings, and to find inspiration for new creations. On this week’s menu you’ll find the return of several Bakeshop favorites, such as buttery Shortbread Squares, crisp and chewy Ginger Molasses Cookies, tender and hearty Blueberry Graham Scones, flaky Pain aux Raisin with rum soaked raisins, and cheesy Savory Tomato Croissants.

Part of the fun of being a baker is that sometimes we choose to bake pastries just for ourselves. A few weeks ago, we had extra dough and the neighbor's Italian prune plums, which had recently arrived, and we were trading ideas back and forth about what we should make with them. Margaret, one of our bakers, told us about her favorite pastry when she worked at Sea Wolf in Seattle, a simple croissant dough plum tart, and another, Melissa, reminded me, as she does every year (smile), that plums are her very favorite fruit. I recalled that we also had a batch on hand of plum jam that was too sticky to sell as jarred jam, and all of that coalesced into simple pastry perfection in our eyes.

The recipe comes from Dorie Greenspan by way of Luisa Weiss. Dorie Greenspan is a prolific cookbook author who authored my desert island book, Baking with Julia. Dorie is a master of not only developing recipes but also has the tenacity to write recipes that are clear and concise. Luisa is also a cookbook author, writes the blog The Wednesday Chef, and was the editor on my cookbook. I am forever grateful for having such a sharp eye on my project.

This week we are winding down the use of bright, juicy summer berries and stone fruits, and shifting to warmer, toastier ingredients including spices, crisp apples, and slow-roasted yams. You’ll find the latter ingredient in two of our very popular seasonal pastries returning to this weekend’s menu: Pumpkin Spice Muffins and Caramelized Apple and Pumpkin Hand Pies!