Sweet & Lucky

I have 6 cupcakes in a box on the seat of my care today. From Sweet Mosaic, an in-house bakery located at Lucky’s Cafe in Tremont. And I made them.

Or really, I measured out flour, salt, shortening, vanilla, eggs, baking soda and baking powder, cinnamon, and vinegar to make the batter for banana cupcakes (I mashed the bananas too) and vanilla cake. Owner Heather Haviland mixed the batter in a vintage Hobart, showed me how to slather the mix in a pan, and she baked, cooled, frosted and decorated everything.

I was her sidekick for a day, and I enjoyed every moment of it.

Imagine. Here you are in heaven. It smells like – well, a bakery. And it is an amazingly beautiful day in Cleveland, which is something I cannot always say. Small space. Kind of like being in a submarine, and we once in a while look through the porthole of the door at the ‘house,’ to see who’s in the coffee shop and what’s going on.

My coworkers are David, an apprentice baker who is finishing up culinary school, and Jody, manager of the coffee shop. David has an easy-going, low-key but friendly manner. Heather calls him ‘Sweetie.’ Jody with her blond ponytail tucked under a cap, has the breezy, confident manner of a barmaid. Which she has been, and is pleased to not be doing now.

While we work, a stream of people poke their heads into one of two doors to the tiny workspace. Keith Sutton, owner of the shop. Matt, a chef with the Barricelli Inn. Carl, photographer and local gardener. A former customer, a lady with cat’s eye glasses, pokes her head in the door and greets Heather, who says, you have to try this cake, I’ll bring some out later. Many get a hug, all get a smile and a warm greeting.

With NPR in the background, we work. With a little banter and some joking (Jody is mad – mad – that she was left out of the late Friday night pizza party for staff), we assemble ingredients in freshly cleaned containers, and slide pans of fragrant cakes into and out of the oven. The triple sink is never empty for long, and every item is returned to a storage rack, table tray, drawer or shelf.

As we work, I learn more about baking, and about my coworkers. I learn that gluten, the essential component for both bread and cake, must be treated differently for different products. For bread, you want a stretchy, sticky dough that comes from the pulling, kneading and rising. For cake, you want the gluten to be light and fluffy, brought out by light mixing and minimal processing. I learn that Heather has worked as a potter, owned a restaurant in Bearsville in New York State, and spent six years as a blacksmith. Without the benefit of a culinary education, she has worked in top area restaurants. Every recipe in the shop has been developed through painstaking trial and error. I find out that David grew up in Mentor, as did I, and that he is a fellow suburbanite who has chosen to live in the city. In addition to cooking, he would love to paint. Jody has worked in many restaurants and bars, but this is what she loves. Getting up at 5:30 am to prepare for the morning shift, greeting the first customers of the day, and of course, brewing wonderful coffee. This makes her happy in a way that bartending never did, she tells me. I also learn that she has a degree in sculpture, and in horticulture. She’s smart and funny and an excellent manager. Jody, like David, lives in Tremont. That’s one of the things that makes Tremont special for me – people who work here, tend to live here, too.

“Are you an oil person, or a butter person?” Heather asks me. Butter, I say. Good, she answers (she is too). Frequently, Heather will pull something from the oven, cut it up and everyone gets a taste. Right now, it’s a loaf of crusty, sourdough bread. “We use a hybrid sourdough, an Italian ‘levain’ method, combined with an American technique, due to our limited cooler space” …whatever. The bread is heavenly.

Jody takes me up to the front of the shop, to show me how to make a cappuccino and a latte. I am shown how to grind fresh coffee and place it in the metal widget that holds it tight in the machine, hand-packing the coffee to exactly 14 pounds of pressure, or close to it. We foam the milk to the proper fluffy peak; I use a thermometer gauge, Jody does it by the sound of the hot steam in the milk, changing the density of the butter fat and proteins and thus the pitch of the air flowing through the hot liquid. I am taught the difference between skim, whole milk and soy. Like everything else here, it’s a combination of art and science, intuition and intellect.

I think this is what I like about cooking – it engages the intellect to the extent that you want to, but really, it comes down to developing an artist’s eye, the sense of touch and smell – this is what makes a great cook, and a good one at home. I tell Heather that I like to cook, but I haven’t done much baking, because it requires strictly following the recipe and measuring it all out. She tells me that I am wrong, that a good baker can adjust each recipe by feel, allowing for changes in the weather, the ingredients or the desired outcome.

I guess it would be interesting to report that Tremont is full of sharp edges and odd angles, that anything named Sweet Mosaic must contain a bitter finish. But this isn’t so, not here. I close the day with a hug from Heather, as she rushes out to take a plate of warm cake to the lady with the cat’s eye glasses.

Lucky’s, which houses Sweet Mosaic and features fresh bakery daily, is located at 777 Starkweather in Tremont. Sweet Mosaic website is: http://www.sweetmosaic.com/