Take one bite of Orcutt Bakery’s signature cheesecake and you instantly discover the secret to their success.
Light and fluffy, with an exquisite and surprisingly fresh burst of fruit topping, the bakery’s cheesecake does more than define the venue’s signature scratch-baked style. It instantly tells you a story about the person who made it.
In her early 20s, Danielle Gerber, the baker behind that perfect dessert bite, found herself working at a plant nursery when she had a realization that the horticulture business just wasn’t for her. She would spend the long winter months, when business slowed to a crawl at the nursery, looking up recipes for baked goods.
“When I got off work, I was baking. That’s all I did,” Gerber said. “It was my escape from the world. The only thing I liked doing was baking.”
As I sat with Gerber in the quiet hours of the morning before her shop opened, eyeing the rows of positively sinful-looking cupcakes in the cases behind her, she described to me the unusual path that led her to owning her business.
“I told my mother I was going back to school to become a baker,” Gerber said, detailing the days when the idea for a business was still in its infancy. Gerber said her mother, wary of the difficult challenge that lay ahead of her daughter, begged her not to do it.
“When you go to [culinary/baking] school, you have labs all day long,” she explained. “So you really can’t have a full time job. But I told her it was the only thing that made me happy, so I quit my job and enrolled in school.”
After completing her program at Allan Hancock College, Gerber’s first big gig in the food industry was as a head baker and trainer at Panera Bread in Santa Maria, a job she worked steadily for three years. She then launched her own business, working from home as a baker, utilizing California’s cottage laws for about a year. She spent hundreds of hours baking and personally delivering her treats around the Central Coast.
She also worked with another local bakery, Gina’s Piece of Cake in Santa Maria, supplying the shop with cake pops, which Gerber still does to this day.
“She was doing such and amazing job,” shop owner Gina Martin said. “Her style is very unique; she uses some very different techniques.”
During that same time, Martin was approached about opening a possible satellite shop in Orcutt, at the former home of Windy City Bakery. But the timing wasn’t right for the venture.
“That’s when I went to [Gerber],” Martin said. “I said, ‘This is perfect for you.’ It was low key. She needed a space out of her home. This work takes up a lot of space.
“I encouraged her because if you ever have a dream, you should go for it,” she added. “There are so many people in this community, there’s room for a lot of bakers.”
Gerber said she had planned to give herself five years to build a business from her home and see where it took her. But it was only eight months before the perfect opportunity presented itself.
Gerber was hesitant to take the leap into her own business, Orcutt Bakery, but her husband, Sean, encouraged her. The shop officially opened on May 18, 2015.
“When we first opened, we weren’t sure what to expect,” she said. Gerber often worked late nights, accommodating every possible order she could.
“[Up until we opened] we had just been making things like cake pops and custom cakes. We had to really branch out,” she said. “The first year was a learning experience—discovering what people around here wanted, and what was really worth devoting our time to.”
If I was my 5-year-old self again, without an eye on my cholesterol level and sugar intake, I would probably lose myself inside Orcutt Bakery. While refined and sophisticated in appearance, the assorted cakes and sweet treats still retain a childlike whimsy about them. The cookies-and-cream cupcake, for example, has a sophisticated elegance that would be perfectly at home on the menu of any fine pâtisserie, yet one bite fills you with the messy glee of a child dunking Oreos into a glass of milk at her mother’s kitchen table.
Like most bakeries, Orcutt Bakery’s biggest financial boon is its custom cakes. Gerber designs cakes for weddings, birthdays, and other events, employing her creative touch on a variety of options that range from kitschy to pure elegance.
The bakery carries standard fare such as cake pops (which I skipped, knowing I would be full on cupcakes and cheesecake before the day was over) as well as a seasonal offering of bars in various flavors like lemon. If you’re not ready to commit to the full cheesecake experience (you really should though), I highly recommend the mini-cheesecakes, which come in caramel swirl, New York style, and raspberry swirl. Another unique creation from Gerber is a croissant cinnamon roll, which sounds like something you should be offered in lieu of money if you win the Nobel Peace Prize.
The blackberry vanilla cheesecake is a star here, even among a crowded field. The fresh blackberries (which Gerber offers a generous amount of) mingle with vanilla-bean drizzle and fresh blackberry sauce. Fresh is the absolute key to the popularity and success of Orcutt Bakery, Gerber emphasized.
“We make everything from scratch,” Gerber said. “We don’t do any store-bought products. You can tell people really enjoy that. It’s a lot more expensive for us, so we’re always trying to find that balance between what’s enjoyable for them and affordable for us. And customers appreciate that.”
She also takes full advantage of the region’s bountiful supply of seasonal fruits. During strawberry season, she sells a strawberry trifle on Sundays made with berries from local stands.
“I would eat those every day of the week,” she said.
Today Gerber and her husband still man the shop by themselves, with her mother—once so fretful for her daughter’s plans—helping out one day a week.
“Everyone knows that when they come into the bakery, they’re most likely going to see me,” Gerber said. “I already know what my customers want when they come in. It’s that small, hometown feel.
“I just like making other people happy with what I make,” she added.
Rebecca Rose can be reached through Interim Managing Editor Joe Payne at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 5-12, 2017.