Petal Pushers

In winter, Bramble concentrates on sturdier blooms, pressed petals, and preserved vegetation. “Our cakes become very viola-heavy,” says Smith. “Sometimes we do a pressed, fresh mélange,” says Kinney, which might include hydroponic, indoor-grown flowers, as well as those the staff presses and dries.

Smith, a Maryland transplant, started baking in part as a way of getting attuned to the local growing season. “When you move to a completely new region of the world, you’re often a little unmoored,” she says. Smith, who was raised in upstate New York and went to grad school for museum studies in Boston, relocated to Maryland for a job as an education coordinator at The Walters Art Museum in 2016. “I had a lot of time in my evenings, so I started baking obsessively, to keep myself occupied, and it became a way for me to become more familiar with mid-Atlantic produce.”

Smith used her income from the Walters to get that foothold and then began honing her baking skills at a commercial kitchen sharing space with a small catering business. In 2019, Bramble became Smith’s full-time job. “It was fun to be in art museums parallel to baking,” she says. “It’s a great place to soak up inspiration. The jury is still out on whether I’ll call cake ‘art’ or not.”

In those early days, Smith and her partner, Robin Rhodes, a full-time musician who plans to help with more events at the bakery when COVID-19 restrictions further lift, would take Smith’s baked goods to farmers’ markets, first the Cross Street market, then the 32nd Street market in Waverly. It was there that many of Smith’s current staff first encountered both baked goods and baker, including longtime staffers like pastry chef Jaime Hacker.

“I want to make rustic rye croissants and not matcha foam,” says Hacker of the career trajectory that brought her from culinary school to a series of restaurants where she found herself following trends rather than baking what she wanted. Hacker was the first person to join Smith’s team—Kinney, the second, came on just before the pandemic—and had been at a crossroads in her career.

“I have this classical French training, worked at enough [restaurants] to realize how toxic the industry was,” says Hacker. “I was thinking about what else to do with my life, and I reached out to Allie via Instagram to see if I could bake with her for fun.”

Bramble’s croissant program began with Hacker, who’s doing a tutorial on the laminated pastry for others in the kitchen. “I’m going on maternity leave in a week and a half, so I’m trying to teach everybody how to do this,” she says, feeding sheets of butterstacked dough through the machine’s roller, like laundry. Nearby, sheet pan racks are loaded with warm buttermilk biscuits and the roasted purple potatoes for pies, waiting for the next stage in the bakery’s production schedule.

Rahma Haji, a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Maryland’s Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program, would wake up early on Saturday mornings to make it to the market stand in time to get babkas, one of Bramble’s specialties. “People love pastries,” Haji says. “That’s literally how I started.” Now Haji spends those weekends behind the counter at the bakery, working front-of-house and further advancing personal pastry skills. “I love to bake; there’s an element of experimentation.”

The same can be said for Smith’s evolving business model, which Smith describes as “ambiguous by design.” This could also describe many of those who have gravitated to her kitchen.

“Bramble has grown into a more queer- and women- led space as we’ve grown our team,” says Smith. “Lots of women, but lots of non-binary folks. We’ve prioritized and will continue to prioritize a work environment that has care at its center, and I do think that there’s a certain queer sensibility and a feminist sensibility that allows us to stay true to that. I’m not sure how the two will inform each other yet, but that’s how we’ve naturally grown.”

Recently, there’s been a lot of discussion about giving back-of-house food service professionals their due, both financially and in terms job contentment. “I entered the food world when there was beginning to be this reckoning about that, and there’s more and more each year,” says Smith. “The pandemic created space for the folks in lower places to be heard.”

Drew Koshgarian arrived for her first day at the bakery with her own rolling pin. Koshgarian says that she wouldn’t have applied for a job at Bramble if Smith hadn’t included a focus on collaboration, responsibility-sharing, and respect in the job description. “Everybody’s become more aware of how things work when everybody feels valued,” says Koshgarian, who worked in bakeries in Los Angeles (and also did improv and stand-up comedy there). “It was wildly antiquated,” Koshgarian says of the restaurant industry. “Allie comes from an art history background; everybody in this kitchen is interesting.”

Clockwise from top, an old flower press; a frosted mini cake with currant tomatoes and dried flowers; fresh fruit and flowers; decorating a cake; the pain au chocolat; pressed flowers for decorating.

Like Hacker and Koshgarian, Dayna Palmer logged time in the restaurant industry. “I focused my career in chocolate for the last six years, but this is the first time I’ve worked in a bakery since culinary school,” says Palmer. “The kind of community that Allie’s trying to create is very inclusive—in any possible use of the word.”

As she speaks, Palmer pours buttermilk into a well in the center of the butter-flour mixture for biscuits—the bakers produce 48 of them on weekdays, selling out in hours. She was the person who added chocolate bon bons to the bakery’s holiday repertoire, which also quickly sold out.

But no matter what delicious treats Smith adds to the menu, flowers will always be Bramble’s signature.

“Part of using flowers is honoring their temporary beauty,” says Kinney, as she carefully stores flattened petals and herbs in binder pages.

With additional flowers—all are non-toxic and/or edible—to feed the sweet workflow coming in from Two Boots Farm, Belvedere Farm Flowers, and Locust Point Flowers, there’s enough to load into an old wooden flower press, donated to the bakery in its nascent days.

“It’s very therapeutic,” says Felicity Lugay, a front-of-house staffer and Towson University special education major, as she lifts mum and tulip petals, leaves of salvia and sage. “When we run out of space [on the flower press], we just use some books,” says Kinney as Lugay brings some thick cookbooks (The Cake Bible, by Rose Levy Beranbaum; Roxana Jullapat’s Mother Grains; Claire Ptak’s The Violet Bakery Cookbook) down from the bakery’s shelves.

Kinney instructs folks to refrigerate their cakes, to keep them out of the sun for the sake of both flowers and buttercream—Smith keeps a blowtorch beside the KitchenAid to help control the temperature of the finicky frosting as the layer cakes are assembled—and recommends that fresh flower cakes are best given, and eaten, as soon as reasonably possible. This is not generally an issue.

Carrie Beha, who—like most of the Bramble staff—moves between front-and back-of-house work, also first learned about the bakery through the farmers’ market. Beha started working as a teenager and never went to college, instead eventually transitioning to a job at Moon Valley Farm, in Woodsboro, one of Bramble’s suppliers. “My heart lit up,” Beha says, after seeing the post on Good Food Jobs about Bramble. Of the bakery’s wider social project, Beha says: “Hopefully we can keep that balance. I think that’s going to be the best part of Bramble—and the hardest part.”

Because despite the garlands of flowers and the warm cookies, working in a bakery is not easy. The demands are high, and the hours are long: Smith starts work at 1:30 a.m. on Saturdays, and on the weekends someone is at the bakery starting at 2:30 or 3 a.m. “The only way to make this kind of work sustainable, when it’s so against our circadian rhythms, and places a lot of demands upon your body, is really to be honest with yourself and with each other,” says Smith. She spreads buttercream on a mini pumpkin layer cake, turning the cake stand around like a clock. “The pinnacle of honesty that we’ve been able to figure out for ourselves, is working toward this collaborative environment.”

Good sourcing, whether local or otherwise, has always been one of Bramble’s priorities.

“It was really important to me to work with local farms and local ingredients,” says Hacker, whose stellar rye croissants, using stone-ground rye flour from Castle Valley Mill in Doylestown, PA, are a masterwork, simultaneously buttery and flaky, and earthy from the whole grains. (All Bramble’s milk and buttermilk come from South Mountain Creamery in Middletown; the pie dough is made with flour from Small Valley Milling in Halifax, PA, and Migrash Farms, near Randallstown; those biscuits are made with with Plugra butter.) “Allie understands how important that is, when I had so many chefs who said, you’re lucky you get any flour at all.”

It’s not difficult to see how Bramble’s workplace setting translates from production table to pastry case. “The stuff I’m doing here,” says Hacker, “is some of the best stuff I’ve ever done.” “Kindness made me want to work here,” says Haji later, sitting outside on the bakery’s sun-drenched bench, summing things up with a baker’s deftness. “It’s great to be a part of something and feel valued, to be in a community. It puts everything into perspective.”

Because depending on where you are in the world, brambles can be roses or weeds, blackberries, even Arctic brambleberries—hardy and resilient, often grown in neglected spaces. And utterly beautiful, not unlike bakers themselves.