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Date: 9/8/2021
ENFIELD, CT – Full-time mother and part-time business owner Cara Lynn Lavender has turned her passion for baking bread in her Enfield kitchen into a bustling business with Bread by Cara.
Lavender wasn’t always interested in baking. “I’m not someone who likes to measure,” she said. But in 2012, a friend brought a loaf of homemade bread to a playdate with Lavender’s child.
“I was just blown away,” she said of the realization that quality bread could be made at home. By 2016, Lavender and her family had moved to Enfield and her husband and mother bought her a Kitchen Aid stand mixer as a gift.
She gifted loaves of bread to friends and family on a weekly basis. After some time of people encouraging her to open a business, she got her cottage bakery license and opened Bread by Cara this January.
The bread business has been booming, she said. “I thought it would slow down a bit in the summer, and it did. People don’t want hot bread in the summer,” Lavender said, but she has begun selling to people in Longmeadow and said that has provided a sales boost.
With the approach of the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, which ran from Sept. 6 to Sept. 8 this year, Lavender saw a rise in orders for traditional challah bread and honey cake. After receiving requests for sweet items, she began offering apple and lemon cakes. She also makes bagels, which she called the most “physically” demanding product, and sourdough.
“I climbed on the sourdough bandwagon with everyone else at the start of the pandemic,” Lavender said. Unlike most bread recipes that simply call for yeast, sourdough also requires live lactic acid bacteria. The bacterial culture is what sometimes makes sourdough difficult to make from scratch. “It’s something that is alive and needs to be cared for,” she said.
“I used the [professional baker and author] Peter Reinhart method of starter,” which consists of unbleached high-gluten or bread flour, water and mother culture. “I may have cried when it didn’t work.” But when she mixed her batch with a friend’s non-working starter, “it was alive. Once you get the hang of it, it’s fairly forgiving.”
Bread by Cara is sold exclusively through Lavender’s Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/Bread-by-Cara-104467631657345. Occasionally, customers who aren’t Facebook members will call or email, but she said she has enough business from those sources and can still devote herself to being a mom.
Lavender’s 7-year-old daughter is “my little sous chef,” when cooking, but the cottage bakery license doesn’t allow anyone but Lavender to make orders for customers. Still, her daughter is learning how to bake for the family.
“It’s amazing what you can make with flour, water and salt,” Lavender said. “That’s all you need to create good bread.”