Love at first dessert

La Panaderia is Brenda Hernández’s creative playground.

The Mexican bakery is located on the main floor of a retrofitted residential building straddling the boundary between Chinatown and the Exchange District. When the Free Press arrived, Hernández, who has spent all morning baking, is standing on a stool drawing papel picados — paper banners — on the windows. Idling is not a familiar state.

“I need to keep my mind busy,” she says with a smile.

Though Hernández brushes off the title of artist, the high white walls of the bakery are covered with her artwork: a mural of super-sized sweets, a painting of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo with three-dimensional flowers, a wall hanging with vibrant pompoms. It’s one way she’s made the minimalist space her own since opening in February.

“I want people to feel like a piece of Mexico is here. I’m proud of where I came from and I want to show people how colourful my culture is,” she says.

Hernández, 46, hails from Mexicali, a city about 175 kilometres east of Tijuana on the California border, and moved to Winnipeg with her family 10 years ago.

She started baking as a teenager when her mom finally let her start experimenting in the kitchen. She dove in with a raspberry-chocolate cheesecake plucked from her mom’s recipe collection.

It was love at first dessert.

Teaching herself how to bake was not, however, easy. There was a lot of trial and error.

“I threw out a lot of cakes,” she says.

“I like perfection.”

With practice, Hernández turned her passion for baking into a business. She specialized in fancy wedding and birthday cakes and took a year-long course in cake-making and decorating in Mexico.

Despite her experience, she struggled to find work in a professional bakery without a culinary arts degree when she moved to Winnipeg.

Hernández persevered and eventually got a foot in the door at Coscto and, later, at Baked Expectations and Cocoabeans.

She never planned on opening her own panaderia, which translates to bakery in Spanish.

“Everybody told me, ‘You need to open your own bakery,’ but in my mind, if I opened a bakery it would be a failure. My family pushed me because they believe in me more than I believe in me. They know this is my happy place,” she says.

She found a listing for the storefront on Facebook, but the ad seemed too good to be true. Even after signing the lease, Hernández kept waiting for the punchline.

“I was thinking it was a joke,” she says.

Standing in the sunlit bakery filled with the aroma of warm yeast, she still has to give herself the occasional pinch.

“I know it’s mine because I can do whatever I want, I can bake whatever I want, but it doesn’t feel like I’m the owner.”

Hernández has left fancy cakes behind and turned her attention to the traditional Mexican breads, pastries and desserts she grew up eating — teleras, tres leches, galleta rellenas and flan.

And the industrial oven is a pretty good substitute for the Easy Bake Oven she asked for many times as a child but never received.

Even though she’s up at the crack of dawn seven days a week, she feels like a kid again.

“It’s so much fun,” she says of working with dough. “It’s like playing with Play-Doh.”

La Panaderia is a family business. Hernández operates the bakery with her four children, who run the counter on a rotating basis. The stocked pastry case has also led to new connections with fellow expats from Central and South America.

“People from Colombia (and El Salvador) come in and say, ‘This is the same bread we have back home,’” she says. “The support from the Latino community has been amazing.”

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Twitter: @evawasney