Boden’s Butter
Good stuff baked from the heart
By Lois Smith Brady

A good bakery—one with hearty baked goods, a mountain view, a colorful chalkboard menu, strong coffee and a strong woman in charge—is as important to a ski town as snow.

Aspen now has a new one: Boden’s Butter Organic Bakery & Gourmet Coffee, a tiny place owned by Kelly Hart, 36. It’s a few blocks from the gondola, in the storefront space of Specialty Foods of Aspen, and consists of an oven, four stools, an espresso machine and purple shelves full of organic sweet breads, muffins, scones, biscotti, sticky buns and macaroons.

The ingredients are all-natural and so is the presentation: Prices are marked with colorful handwritten signs; the icing on the cakes is not necessarily flawless but it is always generous; the popular Kitchen Sink muffins are bumpy, full of freshly grated carrots, apples and zucchini and awesome for hiking a 14er.

Wearing jeans and a ponytail, Kelly bakes all day, with some of her favorite musicians—the Dixie Chicks or Ben Harper—playing.  “I’m not a pastry chef,” she says. “I didn’t go to school. Everything here is home-baked, it’s from the heart.”

Kelly has lived in Aspen since she graduated from college, and worked as a ski instructor, river guide and waitress. She can tune skis, and make latte foam that looks like untracked powder. When she discovered her son, Boden, had food allergies, she began baking breads and cakes for him that contained no eggs or dairy. Eventually, she started selling her treats at the Aspen Saturday Market under the name Mountain Life Baking Co. At the farmers’ market she had such a consistently long line she decided to open Boden’s Butter, named after the goodies she described as “butter” for her son.

Kelly is a stickler about ingredients and supporting small, local businesses. She serves Novo Coffee, grown on free-trade farms and roasted in Denver, and tea from the Basalt-based Two Leaves and a Bud. She uses organic, agave-sweetened syrups in the coffee drinks and fresh-squeezed lemon juice in the glaze on her outrageously delicious blueberry scones.

Every morning Kelly decides what to bake that day. “Should I make blueberry or nectarine scones?” she might ask someone who’s just wandered in. “Ginger cookies?” If a customer doesn’t have enough money, she writes out an IOU. “I’m working to bring trust back,” she says.

And after school, Boden, now 5, is often there, drinking a special smoothie in his blue portable chair. “I always had a dream to open a coffee shop but this really came to be because of my son being allergic to dairy and eggs,” Kelly says.

Funny how life works.

GO FIND IT !
Boden’s Butter Organic Bakery & Gourmet Coffee
601 E. Hopkins Ave., Aspen
(970) 925-7779