Conscious Choice: Baking Up Style

July 2006 | Conscious Dining

Baking Up Style

By Janine MacLachlan

I love finding places that exude great personal style, and when I find small businesses that truly speak to the personalities behind them, I want to dig in and explore. When those small businesses are bakeries, digging in is a pleasure.

Both Angel Food Bakery and Bleeding Heart Bakery make whimsical, vibrant custom cakes. But they also make much more.

Angel Food Bakery, with its pistachio-toned walls, friendly staff and sleek blonde wood chairs, exudes fun. Owner Stephanie Samuels came to her profession early, and has the Easy-Bake Ovens to prove it. She’s decorated her mod interior with scads of those light-bulb-powered bakers. I mentioned that my first oven was a Suzy Homemaker, which I liked because it opened like an oven, and didn’t require the puzzling sliding-in-the-side method of the competitor Easy-Bake. Samuels pointed to the turquoise Suzy Homemaker in the corner. “Like that one?” I would have sworn it was it was the exact same one, if I didn’t know that mine was in my parents’ basement awaiting the next granddaughter.

Samuels specializes in upscale, grown-up versions of childhood classics, like an interpretation of the famous Twinkie, called an Airstream, as well as adaptations of sno-balls and whoopee pies. These whimsical creations stemmed from a project where she was challenged to replicate some Girl Scout cookies. Her thin mint is more than worth the calories and definitely passes the comparison test.

Like many intriguing places and people, Samuels mixes serious with fun. She’s been involved with Inspiration Café, which serves restaurant-style meals to homeless people. Yet she’s appealing enough to capture the attention of the Food Network. On one visit, the phone started ringing suddenly and patrons rushed the doors like a run on the bank — it turns out that whenever the segment runs, there’s an immediate mini-boom of business. But typically there’s plenty of seating for a leisurely cup of coffee and sweet treat.

Seasonal Fruit Takes Center Stage

And Samuels works wonders with fruit. She has an arrangement with Peter Klein’s Seedling Fruit, which also sells to Bleeding Heart Bakery. Each month she makes a custom pastry based on what’s making the trees groan in Michigan. In July we can enjoy roasted apricot muffins, next month plum almond tart. I’ll definitely be back in September for the butterscotch pear bars. I’ve visited Seedling Fruit in South Haven, and they’ve got plenty of gorgeous pears to make into bars.

Bleeding Heart Bakery’s Michelle Garcia also seeks out local ingredients. She buys from Seedling, and gets farm eggs and rhubarb from Homegrown Wisconsin, a cooperative of farms surrounding Madison, Wis. What’s most impressive is that she’s contracted with Illinois producer Adrian Plapp to produce a custom blend of flour that will give her consistency throughout the baking year. Yes, when you’re dealing with seasonal foods from small producers, the ingredients will evolve and change, even flour.

Milk from Down the Street

Just as Samuels was inspired by childhood baking, Garcia was inspired by her vegetarian stepmom, who took her to farmers markets when the rest of us were tucking into frozen TV dinners and canned green beans. Later, she went to a school where punishment was kitchen duty, so she got in trouble on purpose to be banished to the kitchen. She trained at Kendall College, then set her heart on pastry and transferred to the French Pastry School. Her journey took her to Amsterdam, where she worked in a bakery that bought milk from the guy down the street.

“He had the cow in the back of the store, and it never occurred to anyone to buy milk from farther away,” said Garcia. Now she buys milk from Oak Grove, an organic producer in west Illinois that sells non-homogenized milk that you have to shake to mix. Skipping this processing step gives the milk a fresher taste. Regular folk can pick some up at Fox & Obel.

Garcia embraces the idea that food is healthier when not so many hands have touched it, and has created an all-organic, mostly sustainable operation. And she also keeps it fun and vibrantly colorful, a happy juxtaposition in a world where a lot of organic-focused places seem to focus on earnestness rather than taste. The frothy cupcakes are topped with frosting tinted with all-natural vegan food dyes, and the cookie selection is a delightful inventory of flavors like orange polenta, spicy cinnamon and cayenne and, my two favorites, chocolate crème fraiche and vegan Earl Grey. Individual cakes come topped with that colorful icing, or straight up for the purists, in flavors like Meyer lemon or double chocolate stout.

Bleeding Heart Bakery will sell at the Green City Market and four other farmers markets in the city, and has just begun making bread.

The Final Word

Both bakeries also sell sandwiches and other nibbles for a little something savory for lunch, but it’s the baked goods that keep us coming back for the colorful indulgences that we crave. And the fact that both these places make us happy.

Angel Food Bakery, 1636 W. Montrose Ave., Chicago. 773-728-1512. Open 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday; 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday; 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday; closed Monday.

Bleeding Heart Bakery, 2018 W. Chicago Ave., Chicago, 773-278-3638. Open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday; 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday, brunch 8 a.m. – 2 p.m.; closed Monday.

Janine MacLachlan’s search for fabulous food takes her on many adventures.

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