by Monique Meadows
(York Maine)
Clara's Cupcake Cafe in York Beach, Maine - it's all in the dough. And a pastry chef's passion.
I wondered, when I first moved to the area, why there was no bakery in the village of York. Kittery has Beach Pea and When Pigs Fly, Ogunquit has Bread & Roses but, with no disrespect to Hannaford, which does an admirable job with their artisan breads, I wanted to walk into a small hometown bakery complete with steamed windows, old stainless steel and glass cases of large kitchen war-torn aluminum trays of all things baked and frosted, powdered, sugared, dipped and glazed. I wanted a Nicolas Cage, right out of Moonstruck, to walk out of the back of the bakery with a sack of flour over his shoulders and emerge minutes later with fresh baguettes. An old fashioned idea yes, but that's what we all, I think, love about finding a little bakery. Excited at the possibilities of finding a few old fashioned favorites in the cases along with all the nouveau pastry delights of modern times.
When I walked into Clara's Cupcake Café three years ago, the bakery was the latest addition to the renovation of the Atlantic House on Beach Street in York Beach. It was part of celebrity Chef Lydia Shire's culinary installment on the second floor, Blue Sky on York Beach. Clara's was on the ground floor and baked the bread and many of the desserts for Blue Sky. The pastry chef was Jennifer Woods. I commented one time, after discovering and devouring at Clara's a pain chocolat - a french croissant filled with dark chocolate, that if I had had my eyes closed I would have thought I had stumbled into a boulangerie on the streets of Paris. I was transported. I had not had a croissant of that caliber in decades.
Fast forward to earlier this year when Lydia Shire departed from the Blue Sky endeavor and shortly after many of her people followed her path out