Green House Bakery Rachel Caygill’s East Oakland cottage bakery BY Jeffrey Edalatpour
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EAST BAY MAGAZINE | EASTBAYMAG.COM | MAY/JUNE 2022
way through every pastry, it seems like Caygill can make it all—from a fruity frosted doughnut to a multilayered blackberry Danish with a perfect crunch. Should Caygill one day relocate to England, she’d be a shoo-in to make the finals of The Great British Bake Off. On weekend days, two or more times a month, hungry people can line up at the Caygill home, hoping to secure some of her baked goods. She posts the items online once the ever-changing menu is finalized. Folks who plan ahead can preorder a $35 box that they can retrieve on the front porch. The hitch is that the pre-orders sell out within minutes. This is, after all, a bakery with over 10,000 Instagram followers. Social media has been a good friend to Green House Bakery.
While she was on a walk around the neighborhood, Caygill told me that the business would have been very different without social media. “My husband and I always say, you gotta start something, and then it’s going to tell you what it is.” That’s what happened with Green House. “I started it with a general direction, and it has definitely taken on a life of its own,” she said. When she started, Caygill and her husband had just had their third child on the heels of buying their green house in East Oakland. “We didn’t have enough money to pay the bills,” she said. Out of necessity, Caygill started some freelance copywriting work, but that made her want to “squeeze my brain out of my head.” And, as many other trained chefs did during
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PHOTO BY GREEN HOUSE BAKERY
n a hilly street in Oakland, Rachel Caygill’s bakery is in the middle of a suburban block. She runs Green House Bakery out of her, you guessed it, green house. Under California’s cottage food law, her licensed pop-up kitchen operates out of a built-out basement. Having tasted one bite of her strawberry buttermilk layer cake, any doubts about trying a home cook’s baking skills are immediately quashed. After a particularly bad day, Caygill’s layer cake turned my blue mood into a cheerful strawberry pink one. Two things surprised me most about the pastry box I picked up—her mastery of several types of dough and the quality of her finishing techniques. Some bakers excel at pies or cakes, but as I made my
BAKED This is your brain on bread.
