Local bakers are producing cakes so pretty, it’s almost a shame to eat them. Almost.
The sweet smell of sugar is in the air, as local bakeries scramble to meet the demand of orders that come through during the week of Valentine’s Day. But pastry chefs won’t stop there, as Easter, graduations, baby showers, birthdays and wedding season keep them busy year-round.
Whether it is a four layered chiffon cake for a romantic occasion or a colorful fondant sculpted figurine for a birthday party, local pastry chefs said that passion, precision, focus and having fun are a few of the key ingredients to becoming a successful baker.
“I think you have to have a passion for baking and decorating in general before you go to school and learn it all, you have to have the passion to really work and do it all in the field because it is not all easy and fun, it is hard work too,” said Christy Polley, Pastry Department Manager at Costeaux French Bakery in Healdsburg.
Polley studied at Santa Rosa Junior College in the Pastry and Baking Certificate Program before heading out into the job market to practice her skills. She worked for four years in pastry before moving to Costeaux a-year-and-a-half ago to specialize in cakes.
Hauling around five pound bags of sugar and working on a short timeline are just a few of the demands that Polley faces daily while at work.
“Customer feedback is one of the most rewarding parts of the job, decorating the cakes and seeing the customers when they get their cakes and they are so happy it makes it exciting,” said Polley.
“And it’s a creative job, I get to be creative all the time and do what I want, creating fun cakes and designs,” she said.
At Costeaux, the truffle cake is one of their most popular items and they recently reintroduced another favorite, the black box French tuxedo cake, a white chiffon cake layered with Bavarian custard and chocolate truffle with ganache on top.
“We are a scratch bakery, we really try and focus on doing everything from scratch and that is on of my main jobs is finding recipes and creating everything from scratch,” Polley said.
Beginning in April and running through October, the pastry department is extra busy filling orders for wedding season, taking a short break, before launching into the orders for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Just outside the door where Polley is busy decorating, Ramon Santana, the production manager for Costeaux Bakery is always busy managing a large crew of bakers to meet the daily demand for scones, cookies, croissants and other goodies.
“Here we made chocolate croissants,” said Santana as he opened a large refrigerator stuffed full of fresh sweet rolls waiting to be baked. Earlier that morning, the crew had baked 1,000 plain croissants and 400 scones.
“I like everything about my job, I am happy here, it’s fun, I have been here 10 years,” said Santana.
Other bakers like pastry artist Jeannette Messoria, owner of Sweet Cakes and Sugar Flowers in Larkfield said that having a love for what you do is what makes you successful in the field.
“I have always baked, but I got started when my son was about a year old and I made him a Mickey Mouse cake, and the year after it was a 3D triceratops and every year after that it has always been something different,” Messoria said.
As more and more people found out about Messoria’s baking and decorating skills, the more requests she began getting for birthdays and weddings. With the help of her mother, the two women worked from home constructing cakes before growing the business to a bigger space in the Larkfield Shopping Center.
“It is so much fun and now we are going to move, we have a bigger location in the front of the shopping center,” Messoria said about continuing to expand the storefront this year.
“I am really about custom cakes, I absolutely love to make out of the box cakes, I mean this is going to be a four-foot Lego guy,” she said, turning the large fondant body of the cake around to show the detailing.
Depending on the project, some cakes take hours to put together while others take days. Whatever the task, Messoria said she gets excited to take on new challenges.
For the day of the Feast of the Saint Valentine, both Costeaux French Bakery and Sweet Cakes and Sugar Flowers have special treats made up for visiting customers along with many other bakeries around the county.
