Eat, Drink, Savor: Heavenly Bakery lives up to its name with truly divine desserts

At the end of the first dinner I attended at Hollister, about 10 years ago, shortly after moving to San Juan Bautista, the host pulled out a beautiful cake and just said “Heavenly Bakery” as if he it was a rare and special treat.

I don’t remember the cake, but I remember it was very good. I have become a regular customer, not so much for the cakes as for the fruit pastries and the many varieties of bread, especially the croissants.

Heavenly Bakery was opened in 2010 by Sheila and Bob Stevens, who owned the Knife & Fork Cafe on San Benito Street (now closed). Their motivation was purely selfish – they wanted to keep the baker Carlos Hernandez nearby so he could continue to supply them with his bread.

“I worked as a pastry chef at a restaurant called The City House, where the Grove is now on Highway 156,” he said. “I was also baking bread for Sheila and Bob, and when the restaurant closed I told them they better stock up on hot dog and hamburger buns because I was going to be moving somewhere else.”

The day after her announcement, Bob told her that he had seen a “for sale” sign at a bakery on San Benito Street, near his restaurant, and that he had just bought it for Hernandez.

“He had everything we needed to start,” Hernandez said. “A lot of people knew me from The City House, but I didn’t know anything about downtown. But Sheila knew a lot of people in town, and she spread the word to her clients, so it was an instant hit.

Hernandez, 41, grew up in Mexico and has been a baker his whole life. He learned to cook from an early age while helping his mother in the kitchen.

“She wasn’t much of a baker,” he says, “but she showed me her recipes and I helped prepare our usual meals. I learned enough to open a small pastry shop when I was 17. When I decided to try something bigger, I went to North Carolina and started working with pastry chefs, some of them French, who taught me more.

His years of experience have made him a perfectionist in his baking, and he is always on the lookout for improvement.

“I built the business with my recipes,” he said. “I work on them until they match my taste and my idea of ​​quality. I don’t stop until I think it’s the best, and only then will I start selling it.

As anyone who has tried cooking can tell you, a level of technical skill is required to achieve the best results. For Hernandez, every day can be a new challenge for his talents.

“The secret to baking is that even if you use the same dough and the same recipe, things will change every time,” he said. “Everything affects baking – like humidity, time, everything changes. Proofing is very important; I think that’s something people don’t do right. We let our bread rise overnight. Everything has to be taken into account, but when the planets align, the cooking will be super good.

Bread can rise all night, but it won’t be alone in the bakery. The production of everyday goods always begins the day before.

“We have three bakers,” he says. The first one starts at 2 a.m. and starts baking, the next one arrives at 4 a.m. and starts making the bread, then I arrive at 5 a.m. and take over. We’ll end up with the pastries at 7am, right at the customer’s entrance.

While inflation has hit the bakery as hard as it has everywhere in the restaurant business, Hernandez is aware that many of his regular customers are seniors on fixed incomes and is trying hard not to raise prices. .

“Some of our customers come in for breakfast and then they come back for lunch,” he said. “Lately, maybe you haven’t seen them that day because they can’t afford it. So you have to take care of your customers, that’s what keeps us going. Honestly, the love the community has shown us, even during the pandemic, makes me feel like I belong at Hollister.

Since I’m a regular customer of the shop, I asked Hernandez to pick out some things for us to try on that I don’t usually buy on the way in.

I usually get apricot or apple turnovers, which have a generous amount of fruit wrapped in a lightly browned, glazed batter. They are super hot or cold and remind me of the ones my grandma from Ohio made for us kids.

If they have croissants – which sell out quickly – I usually grab some too. I use them for reheated chicken sandwiches, and the bread holds up well to reheating, maintaining a nice crispness in the crust.

And if I need an extra reward, I’ll add their Oatmeal Butter Flat Cookies, which have an exceptional balance of chewiness and crunch.

With that in mind, Hernandez selected a few more treats, leaning heavily on her stellar assortment of cupcakes.

Heavenly Bakery Desserts

Strawberry cupcake – The first cupcake we tasted was pure strawberry, from the strawberry mousse frosting cake to the slice of fruit on top. While the cupcake itself is perfectly moist and full of flavor, the star here is the frosting. As is the case with all the cupcakes I’ve tried, the use of sugar in the mousse is restricted which makes this taste more like a strawberry milkshake than frosting and prevents the flavors to be overwhelmed by the sweetness.

Italian rum cupcake – If asked, I would have called this Tiramisu because it has all the same flavor notes. The cake is soaked in a coffee-rum mixture and topped with a hazelnut-vanilla mousse and white chocolate-mocha pearls. It’s elegant and refined in a way you wouldn’t expect from a cupcake, both in flavor and in presentation. It would be a great addition to dinner parties as a light dessert.

Chocolate mousse cupcake – I’m a bit lost on this one because my recorded tasting notes for this are just me saying, “oh, that’s good”, over and over. But it’s not a cupcake you’ll forget; chocolate cake, chocolate mousse and chocolate ganache are all made from scratch and light as a feather. It’s like eating a creamy chocolate bar with distinct chocolate flavors blended harmoniously. Delicious.

Carrot Cake Cupcake – I love carrot cake but, being allergic to nuts, I can rarely find it nut free. This is a nut-free version, and it’s absolutely delicious. Moist, dense and fluffy with a great texture, combined with the cream cheese frosting and spiced with cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg, you have a perfect bite of carrot cake. This recipe, according to Hernandez, took 10 years to perfect, but he’s created a wonderfully complex comforting cupcake here. This is one I would recommend as a great introduction to the store.

Lemon cupcake – With the lemon cupcake topped with lemon frosting and filled with lemon curd, the three different tones of lemon bring a crisp, fresh flavor that resembles fruit picked straight from a tree or solid lemonade. This one grabs your attention from the first bite and only gets better when you hit the lemon curd. If I had to use one word for the treats I tried during this tasting, it would be “balance”: Hernandez wants you to taste the flavor of each ingredient. The sweetness and acidity here are carefully contained, allowing all the flavors to come through without one overpowering the other.

Cinnamon Cronut – Croissant dough that has been shaped, flattened into a disk, baked, and topped with cinnamon and sugar. They are much lighter than a cinnamon roll, with all the flakyness of a croissant. These reheat very well but come out of the display case well. Reheated or not, it would be nice with hot chocolate for dipping.

Fudge Brownie – Where the chocolate mousse cupcake held off is the purest chocolate you can get. Crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside, the thin brownie is drenched in chocolate ganache, with a swirl of white chocolate on top. Very rich and very sweet, it practically only asks to be tasted with a glass of cold milk. If you like chocolate, start with this one!

BenitoLink thanks our subscribers, Hollister Super and Windmill Market, for helping to expand the Eat, Drink, Savor series and provide our readers with the stories that matter to them. Hollister Super (two stores in Hollister) and Windmill Market (in San Juan Bautista) support stories about the inspired and creative people behind the many delicious food and beverage products made in San Benito County. All editorial decisions are made by BenitoLink.