SPARTANBURG BAKER

Liz Blanchard

By Mamie Morgan

Liz Blanchard once spent three months ruining every batch of caramel she tried. “It kept seizing up and crystallizing. I was baffled,” she says. “It took a while to figure out I had been rushing.” As it turns out, what the caramel needed was patience and a squeeze of lemon juice.

If there is any doubt that baking is an art form that requires not only patience but precision, Liz’s stories set the record straight. There’s the time she tackled a cake project that involved a pink fondant bow on top. “I had to remake it three times, because the bow kept turning out like a pair of handcuffs.” Her relationship with the cheesecake proved equally slow and frustrating, and yet the sometimes seasons-long system of trial and error seems to have, also, its rewards. “They’re fussy. Sometimes it takes six months of failure and then there it is: your first legitimate cheesecake. And somehow you remember what you’ve done; you can do it again and again.”

Baking, Liz claims, requires much more than precision and patience. It needs all of your attention, all of your love. And if that attitude rings maternal, it should. When Liz tells me this, we’re standing barefoot in her kitchen eating warm peanut butter cookies. When I ask how she came into the world of baking she shrugs, one hand on her pregnant belly, says, “My mother thought it was important.”

Her latest endeavor is Cakehead Bakeshop, one of several promising businesses that have opened in downtown Spartanburg.

Located on the bottom floor of the city’s Masonic Temple, it rests behind Little River Roasting’s Coffee Bar and The Hub City Bookshop. The bakery is painted a pale, bright yellow. She’s exposed a far wall so that sun streams through a row of windows. It feels, quite simply, good. The space is what a home décor magazine would certainly deem intimate, yet inviting.

Liz attributes the bakery’s lucky beginnings to Hub-City’s founder Betsy Teter. Betsy, along with an uber-supportive community, have helped to raise over nine thousand dollars by holding what they termed a bakery shower.

If baking, like any other art form, is one that plays between the world of the individual and the world of the social, the community, Liz’s mission speaks entirely to that. “My hope is that every baked good, pastry, and cake will evoke comfort and familiarity with one’s own history with sweets.” Her baking is derivative of a mixed bag—from rustic, old family recipes to things she’s learned during her many years living among a world of pastry chefs.

When her family lost their Mississippi home to Hurricane Katrina, they also lost their famous box of recipes. “It was a crazy box,” Liz says with a wry smile. “Totally disorganized, with recipes written on the backs of bills and envelopes.” After the hurricane, Liz and her mother threw themselves into the task of piecing together this complicated and vital part of their history. Utilizing everything from memory to Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking to the internet, they managed to patch together most of the recipes.

The family’s carrot cake, though, remains a work in progress. “We remember the basics, we remember to use cooked carrots instead of raw, we even remember proportions.” It’s one more intangible thing lost to the storm, to the lapses in our memory, one more item on the list of what should be rebuilt.

Liz has come a long way from her beginnings as a sixteen yearold light baker in one of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi’s coffee houses.

After working with a string of chefs, perhaps the most notable being James Beard Award winner John Currence, she is excited to have her own bakery. Like any artist, Liz has crafted her own methodology. When we are together, she makes sure all countertops are spotless. Her provisionals include a clean slate and good music, most likely, she says, “chick rock.”

While she enjoys the precision of baking, there are times when Liz enjoys being wild in the kitchen. “I have a tendency,” she says, “to enter into my baking world, to take risks. A lot of classically trained pastry chefs don’t because, well, they know better. If I truly understood the science, it might not be as fun.”

If bakers were once considered an afterthought, that time has come to pass. If anything, this genre of cooking is in its season of stardom. Gone—or nearly gone—are the days when pastry chefs were underappreciated, when a line cook or chef might ruin an entire tray of desserts by simply throwing a box of seafood on top of them in a walk-in cooler.

The South, especially, is a place that takes comfort in comfort. We are a people who celebrate and console ourselves and each other with baked goods; this has always been our way.

Perhaps, too, this tradition of close-knit community is why local food movements are catching on fast. Liz hopes that the bakery’s future will contain all local, cage-free eggs and produce from the Upstate’s abundance of resources, such as Bellew’s and Spartanburg’s farmers’ market.

A few days after our meeting, after she has filled me to the brim with cookies, after I spend two hours walking her beautiful Hampton Heights neighborhood and missing my own childhood home only a couple of miles away, Liz sends me an email. I’m glad for it; I want to know everything. “I wish I could have baked for my husband’s grandfather,” it opens. “I think I would have baked him a fried apple pie. And about my mom. I don’t think I did her justice. She’s tough. She loves to feed family and friends, even strangers, and has often done so in miraculous ways, making a feast out of the least bit of groceries.” Isn’t this also our way? To take care of our families, the ways in which we tell others about them, to take care of our culinary history, how we carry it with us and replicate the best we can, and, in the end, gift it to others.

A story: Last winter, I realized my own mother, a native of New Orleans, was hording small plastic baby figurines, the kind you find in a king cake if you’re lucky. I found a Zip-Loc of them in my parents’ pantry. When I asked her why on earth, she said, “There’s a baker in town named Liz. She can’t find a supply of babies for this season’s cakes and Mardi Gras’s around the corner, so I thought I’d begin collecting some for her.” My mother didn’t know Liz, only knew that they were both people from the Gulf, people who loved and cherished their culture and their cakes. She wasn’t going to let the baking of one of her own go to pot. In theory, it’s that simple: Spartanburg is a city that wants its city to work. It’s a community where people talk to each other, a place where citizens ask their neighbors what they need.

Liz is excited about Cakehead Bakeshop’s first autumn. “It’s my favorite season for baking,” she says. “Autumn allows me to use my two favorite ingredients: pumpkin and nutmeg. I love fall flavors and warm whiskey sauces.” They create, in the face of coming cold, the perfect marriage of spice and bite.

Cakehead Bakeshop
188-B W. Main Street
Spartanburg, SC 29306
864-585-8774
www.cakeheadbakeshop.com

RECIPE

Pumpkin Spice Bread Pudding with a Maker’s Mark Whiskey Sauce