Marquette Baking Company

I hope everyone had a nice Christmas.  We powered through — baked a lot of Stollen, Christmas cookies, Saffron Buns and everything else.  Thank you for all the business!  It was a lot of fun, but it was nice to take a couple days off after the dust cleared.

We will be closing a little early at 4pm on New Year’s Eve (Thursday) and then remain closed Friday and through the weekend.  The new year starts for us on Tuesday 5 January.  We’ll be back on our regular hours 7am-6pm Tues-Fri and 7am-4pm on Saturday.

I’m working on a new schedule to post for January.  (Look for it on the main page of our website in a couple days.)  We will be changing the Cornish Saffron Bun schedule a little.  They have always been very popular, so we are going to start baking them 2 times each month.  Instead of baking them just the last Thursday, we’ll bake them the 2nd and 4th Thursday of each month.  For January, the 4th Thursday is the same as the last Thursday, but eventually there will be a month with 5 Thursdays.

Because of the Saffron Bun change, we will now be baking Irish Soda Bread on the third Thursday of each month instead of the 2nd Thursday.  Finnish Cardamom Bread will remain on the 1st Thursday of the month.  This will all make sense when you see the new bread schedule.

I was able to get a big box of hazelnuts (filberts).  Their flavor is unmatched when combined with bread and chocolate,  so we are going to make good use of them in January.  On Fridays we will be baking Hazelnut Raisin Bread instead of the Cranberry Pecan.  And we will also put Chocolate Hazelnut Melt-away Cookies on the menu to replace the Chocolate Pecan Melt-aways.  If you love Pecan version, you better come in and get the last of them today or tomorrow.  We might have a few to bake off on Tuesday yet, but that will be it after that.

Best wishes in the new year.

Peter

We’re having the first blizzard of the season today.  I just checked the weather and it shows a blizzard warning until 1am tomorrow morning.  That’s life in the UP, eh?

We are going ahead with today’s Cornish Saffron Bun bake, as well as everything else on the schedule [December Bread Schedule].  Our long, slow fermentation style of baking gives our breads the quality and distinctive flavors you’ve come to expect, but it makes it very difficult to change plans at the last minute.  Everything was already put in motion yesterday, and once they are started, you either bake them or throw them away.

Thursday we are baking our monthly batch of Irish Soda Bread.  Friday we will have Stollen and Challah again.

Saturday, it’s something new for us.  We are baking St. Lucia Buns (Lussekatter). I know them as a Swedish tradition, but they may be traditional to other Scandinavian countries, as well.  The dough is similar to  Cornish Saffron Buns, but it does not contain  currants and golden raisins in the dough.  They are also are formed into several prescribed shapes and accented with dark raisins.  They are as lovely to look at as they are to eat.  Here’s a page that shows some of the traditional shapes: [Lucia Buns Photo Gallery].

Take care of yourselves. If you want to venture out, we’ll keep the coffee fresh and hot for you.

Peter

Thanksgiving is over, and on to Christmas and the other December holidays.  Of course, holidays mean special breads and that means December is a complicated month to schedule.  It’s so complicated that I actually laid out a calender for the month so that you can keep track of what breads are available when.  You can pick up a calendar at the bakery, or it will soon be on the website when you click on the “Bread Schedule” link.

Just to get you started, today (Thursday) we baked Cardamom bread, as we do every first Thursday of the month.  Tomorrow (Friday) we are baking Challah, and Stollen.  I intend to keep Challah on the schedule every Friday throughout the year, but we are baking the Stollen only in December.  I normally like to give a link to Wikipedia for something unusual, but the entry for stollen is terrible.  It decribes it as a “fruit cake” and continues to use the term “cake” throughout the article.  Stollen is NOT a cake, it is a yeast levened bread.  And in my opinion, a well made stollen is most delicious thing you can eat.  Yes, it’s loaded with butter, sugar, almonds, butter, liquor soaked fruit and butter, but it is worth every calorie and then some.  Please stop in for a sample.  We’ll have them for as long as we can tomorrow.

We encourage you to call ahead for any of our special breads.  Since the ingredient cost is so high we make them in limited quantities to avoid havinging any left over.

Peter