Marquette Baking Company

There are a lot of food traditions surrounding Lent and Holy Week.  One that I like is the traditional pretzel shape being representative of someone in prayer.  Unfortunately, I am not ready to deal with the hazards of lye to make prezels this year.

Hot Cross Buns are another traditional Lenten treat.  I enjoy making them every year and we will be baking them every Friday during lent.  I’m not sure how well they will sell, so this first Friday, we will only make a few dozen.  If they sell out quickly, we will make more of them the next week.  Please send me e-mail if you would like to reserve some.

Another new bread we baked for the first time this past Saturday was Corn Bread.  Instead of being soda leavened as is the southern tradition, this one is a yeast bread.  And the pedigree of the formula is pretty special too.  It was originally baked by the US team at the World Cup of Baking in 1996.  Me being me, couldn’t leave well enough alone and I added a bit of Sue Raker’s Keweenaw Gold organic honey to the mix to give it a little sweeter and more complex note.  It’s a very nice bread, so start planning for chili Saturday night because we will be baking it again on Saturday.

Thanks for all the support.  We’ll see you at the bakery soon.

Peter

I’m sorry that it’s been a month since my last update.  We’ve been really busy and needed to make some staffing changes.  It just sucks time away from things like this.

First off, thank you for all the comments from the last posting.  I take our customers needs, ideas and criticisms very seriously and am using them to make the bakery a better place.

Among the changes is that we now have a new pastry chef who is turning out some wonderful products.  Her name is Lisa and she is often around the front counter in the morning.  Please stop in and say “Hi”.  She is responsible for the new sugar cookies that we can’t keep on the shelf, new flavors of scones, the Linzer Hearts for Valentine’s Day and general all-around jazzing up of our entire pastry line.  I’m very excited to have her on board!

The other staffing change is that Hannah, our counter salesperson from the start, has left to pursue her dreams elsewhere.  We have not replaced her, but we have added Kirsten to cover the late afternoons.  She is very friendly and full of energy.  You will like her!  The rest of the time, you’ll see one of the bakers, Rowan, Jay, Lisa or myself, taking turns at the counter so feel free to talk shop with any of us.

For Valentine’s day we have a few special things going on.  We have a joint marketing arrangement with Garden Bouquet and Design across the street.  When you buy flowers at Garden Bouquet you can add our cookies to the arrangement, and we have their long stem roses for sale in our store.

We also will have several treats, special for Valentine’s day.  First off, we have the aforementioned heart shaped sugar cookies.  They are heads and tails better than the ones we were selling for Christmas and the colorful icing make them quite lovely.  In addition, we will have a heart shaped edition of our scrumptious Bostock.  If you haven’t tried it yet, you must!  We brought it back a few weeks ago and I’m glad we did.  We also have the beautiful and delicious raspberry jam filled Linzer Hearts.  They are every bit as good as they look.

I hope to see many of you tomorrow.  We’ve been running out of a lot of our pastries lately, so come early for the best selection.  Happy Valentine’s Day!

Peter