Delivering the Goods

Bake Me Happy is churning out some of the city’s best baked goods (despite the fact that they’re gluten-free), and now they’re doing it from a former Merion Village Post Office

By Melinda Green / Photos by Jen Brown / Story Design by Atlas Biro

It’s been seven months since Bake Me Happy moved from Merion Village to the 4000-square-foot former German Village Post Office on Parsons and Whitter. Becoming a property owner and investing in the South Side community has served the bakery well.

“If you’ve ever moved a business, man, it’ll break ya down,” co-owner Letha Pugh said, laughing. The construction timeline “got blown out of the water,” and the staff finally started packing in early July for the early fall move. Letha, and co-owner/baker Wendy Pugh, orchestrated the project together.

“It’s a process. You start throwing out the things you haven’t used in five years: furniture, all the things you collect, just like at home,” Letha said. “Then you start packing up things.”

“What was difficult was restaurant equipment,” she continued. “There aren’t a lot of companies that will move restaurant equipment, so you know, it’s pretty expensive. It takes quite a bit of organization and patience and money.”

Plus, the staff was furloughed, with pay, for almost a month during the move. But the expense is paying off.

One key to the new space’s success is the return of their open kitchen setup. “I think we kind of lost the ability for Wendy and the crew to, one, be acknowledged for their work, and two, interact with the customers and the supporters,” Letha said. “Now we’re back to that. I think sometimes with open concept kitchens, if you aren’t really focused on what you’re doing, you could forget to add the pound of sugar. We have it set up in a way that their workflow isn’t interrupted.”

All of this change is ideal to feed into their North Market Bridge Park location in Dublin, which opened just over two years ago. The Parsons location handles the preparation and delivers product to Dublin, where items are finished in a convection oven.

And corporate orders have been picking up as well, like those Unicorn Bars at Mikey’s Late Night Slice, filled with fruity pebbles and edible glitter.

If you’ve never been to the bakery, you might feel a bit suspicious when you learn it’s entirely gluten-free. The term conjures up tough, gritty, and often flavorless lowest-common-denominator workarounds. But this is very different. These cookies, brownies, and muffins are so good, you’ll forget they’re missing a staple ingredient.

Remember those Oatmeal Creme Pies and Ding Dongs you loved as a kid, that just taste cheap and disappointing now that you’re grown up? Bake Me Happy has—well, we can’t call it the next best thing, because it’s the best thing. It’s everything you remember, and big-kid-sized, made with equal parts of passion and quality ingredients.

“Everything has a different flour mixture,” Letha said. “What works for the cookies doesn’t necessarily work for the pie shells.” The baking flours and grains are proprietary mixes of ingredients like brown and white rice, sorghum, and potato starch, for light, chewy, and crisp textures that are indistinguishable from, or even more refined than, their gluten-full counterparts.

Sometimes the bakers will work on something as a group, honing a recipe over the course of weeks in their free time. Letha said that one of their bakers just created a vegan gluten-free cookie. “She’d been working on that for a while, because what’s the binder? With no animal and no gluten, what’s really keeping your cookie together?”

While they recover financially from the toll a move takes, they’re already investing in their new home turf. “We have always loved the South Side, so it’s nice to kind of see support for small businesses popping up here and there,” Letha said.

“But you know I think that a bigger testament is just the support that we’ve gotten from the local banks, SBA, and giving other small businesses that want to take the leap to buy the building they’re in, it can be done. It cuts into your cash flow, but it can be done.”

Letha serves on the Executive Committees of the Women’s Fund of Central Ohio and Service! Relief for Hospitality Workers, and she’s the President of the Franklin County Recreation and Parks Commission. Plus, she just graduated from the Affordable Housing Trust developer program. It’s only natural that she’s heavily invested in her community.

The team is also active in Dublin. Letha explained, “It’s a completely different neighborhood, but I will tell you what, Dublin is amazing, and the people are supportive, and a lot of work in diversity and equity, and so being out there is not a drag on my soul. I actually feel good about it, you know?

“It’s [all] about us collectively knowing and working with other small business owners to support community needs. It really is using our ability to reach folks, other small business owners who, you know, you may not have a hundred thousand dollars to give, but if ten people can give a thousand dollars, hey, that makes a huge impact.”

But they never lose sight of their first priority. “Our whole goal with Bake Me Happy is hey, let’s make a product that, it doesn’t matter if you’re gluten free or not: you’re gonna enjoy it,” Letha said. “I’ll be the first to say that gluten-free people were kind of eating cardboard cookies there for a while. There’s been a huge shift, and, with Wendy and the crew, some innovation in gluten-free baking.

“We try to spread the love as much as we can. I think that’s important.”

To learn more, visit bakemehappygf.com